I really liked how in the Ted video we were required to watch, that the teacher gave the students an opportunity to engage with the math problem. First, she used some scaffolding questions and then she used “wait time”. I think in all subjects wait time is necessary. I think reflecting on what you know and what you are learning are both very important parts of teaching and learning.
In class, we talked about how it is important to be able to articulate what you are thinking and why you think certain things. These reasoning skills are typically supporting ideas with factual evidence behind them when it comes to science; but when it comes to mathematics, I think a lot of it is just conceptual understanding. The way one student comes to an understanding is probably not going to be the way another student comes to the same understanding. In science, you understanding of mitochondria is factual. You know what it is, what it does and where it belongs. For comparing fractions, you need to conceptualize how big it would be and understand how you got that model, you need to understand how to compare fractions and there are many ways to do this. In fact, I just recently got the opportunity to reflect on this. I used to think math was math. You were given a question, you responded with an answer that everyone would solve with a specific algorithm and that would be that. The end.
However, this is not the case and as a future educator, I am learning that I need to be ready to anticipate all the different ways a student might engage with the same content. I have to think about how the textbook might cause some misconceptions in word problems and I have to think about how some words have a double meaning and students might get stuck on that. This is something that completely fits in with what I understand disciplinary literacy to be.
Back to the te talk video, she then had students pair and share their thoughts. I recently learned that it is important for students to not only have original ideas, but for them to listen and think about the ways other students engage with math. Students are then able to communicate better and also to make connections, which will most likely lead to a better understanding of the content. It’s a win win. Also when students are engaging with their own ideas and other ideas, they are listening, speaking and reading, just in the first minute of the video, which are all different forms of disciplinary literacy within this one content area.
As I am continuing to reflect on what disciplinary literacy looks like in each of the content areas, I am slowly wrapping my brain around exactly what disciplinary literacy is in my own understanding and this means I am figuring out how I will incorporate it in my own classroom in the future.
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After analyzing your post, I have come to the conclusion that I agree with your thinking process in terms of students understanding things differently. Students are going to be looking at certain aspects of question given to them and look for ways to come up with an answer. In terms of being in a math class student would look at different ways to break down the problem, find a solution, and then prove their answer. It will more than likely lead to students having different step-by-step processes. With certain aspects of the classroom changing in terms of “bettering the classroom environment” and technology being introduced it is tough to keep up students.
Your point talking about being an educator and being ready to anticipate whatever a student throws at you as they are learning the content you are teaching them. I feel that being ready for a student to want a textbook, and then some students wanting oral instruction, or even some students learning better through PowerPoints. You need to be flexible as an educator to ensure that all students are able to grasp what you are teaching them, so they are successful once they progress pass your class. We agree in terms of having students communicate with one another and listen to each other’s answers as they are trying to learn. Student on student learning in my opinion is more productive for students than just taking instruction from educators.
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Yeah I think you’re discovery is really important: Math is not just math. I think we need to remember that the disciplines that inform our teaching even at the elementary level are open ended inquiries, and they are always changing. If not in major ways, they are refining and adding onto what has already been said. But sometimes they shift in major ways that turn the field upside down. The discovery that the earth was round revolutionized astronomy. In English, the conversations around whether or not it’s worth our time to pass on a canon of texts written by people with the same skin color, same religious context, and same kind of values has also revolutionized English. I know less about math but I what I know is that teaching in mathematics has undergone some major shifts. The common core standards reflect an approach to math that is much more about the reasoning than it is about the memorization of formulas. By teaching that the disciplines are open-ended we are also slowly giving students keys to the centers of the discipline, the places where major changes begin. Is this exciting or scary?
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