Module 7- Teaching Practice

Module 7

Last week, I spent a lot of time within my lesson planning with my department chair working to make my lessons more organized for my students in order to prevent opportunities where students can have the chance to talk and get off task. I did this by chunking my lessons in better ways by having my students take notes for approximately 10 minutes and then try some example problems for 5 minutes, followed by more notes and practice problems, which then lead into a slightly longer activity with a discussion of sequences. I found this to be successful and my students liked it because the note taking was broken up into smaller parts. By doing this, my students were able to get more active work within groups as well as more discussion time in class which is my goal. I want my students to be exploring mathematics on their own for the most part rather than me simply teaching them how to do it. I want students to create these connections between the material and their prior knowledge. 

Additionally, I found that my algebra 2 students prefer working in groups to learn rather than in competitive settings individually. I found this to be interesting because many times individuals like competition, but my class was more interested in working in groups competitively, so I have decided to make the majority of practice work as competitive group work. My algebra 2 students also have struggled to make connections between parabolas and quadratic functions. We had an activity where students would plot points on their calculator where the radius of a paper circle was measured and then the weight of the circle was measured, and then the values were put into a table. The radius was the x-value and the weight was the y-value and this relationship is quadratic in nature. The overarching question for my students was, "if the radius of a disk is double, does the weight double as well? " Many of my students initially told me that yes, it must, but then found out they were wrong. I showed my students the relationship in a slightly different way by showing them the formula for the area of a circle, A=Pi(r^2) showing that if the radius is doubled, the area would change by a factor of 4/. 

In this last week, I spent a lot of time with classroom management and am planning to change the seating chart on Monday from pairs of desks in rows in the classroom to groups of 4 in the effort to get students talking in their groups rather than across the room. Moreover, I implemented a new behavior system where students get three strikes for talking or bad behavior and 3 strikes equates to a phone call home and the second time I have to do this it will be a referral. My students are starting to become more comfortable in the classroom and starting to ignore the classroom expectations.