Week 2

Hello and welcome back! This week's blog focuses on Knowing, Doing, and Understanding of math. We also looked at more math mindset! 

In-Class Discussion

   One of the main ideas about this week's class was the idea behind knowledge vs understanding. Which one is more important? This is a tricky topic - I sometimes believe the knowledge is more important than understanding. What I mean by knowledge is that students know the main concepts of math rather than applying them. However, time and time again I see students struggle to apply their knowledge on problem-solving questions as they do not understand the math question. This last placement my associate teacher and I tried really hard to tell students that every math equation is a "sentence"  and tells us, the reader, some sort of information. Basically what we wanted the students to understand is that they do not just write down a math equation down without understanding what it is saying - even in a post-secondary setting I have seen students struggle to understand this concept. One can argue that problem-solving questions are flawed and need to be revamped going forward. If there are language barriers or language issues in general students will struggle with word problem-solving questions. This is always a good conversation to have with other educators!

In-class we saw a video called How Old is the Shepard, here we see students not fully understand the question and just apply their knowledge to what they think is right.

This is what I saw when I did EQAO practice with my students this past placement. However, rather than being a "trick" question like this, my students were not able to understand word problem questions. A strategy my associate and I did was to try and emphasize keywords to students when reading the questions. This helped some students - also just reading them the question was also extremely beneficial for the students as well too. A good resource that my teacher showed me was this website: http://www.ldonline.org/article/62401/. These strategies help out target other multiple intelligences - such as visual and auditory learners. I think this is what we need to start doing with word problem questions - differentiate the questions so that students can understand it much better!

Online Discussion:

This week's math mindset module focused on the growth mindset and how it looks like in a math class. During the 1st year of teachers' college, the beginning portion of it talked about the growth mindset and what it is and how it looks like in the classroom - here a quick video to illustrate growth mindset.



We want to believe that the majority of our students have a growth mindset and that we try to encourage having a growth mindset. However, it is not until you are in a placement classroom that you realize that a lot of students fear to make mistakes and even though you encourage mistakes so that "we can go through it" and talk about the mistake - here is a resource I found to help students overcome their fear of being wrong (https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/overcoming-the-fear-of-being-wrong/). To be honest, I think I have a hybrid up of growth and a fixed mindset. In some areas, I believe that if I keep practicing I will get better but in some areas, I believe that even though I practice - I may maintain the level that I am at and not get better. After watching the video about the research about using the word smart and praising students, it is shown that when given a chance do something hard versus something easy the students that were labelled as smart didn't want to do the hard questions but rather the easy ones and the students that were praised for their efforts decided to challenge themselves and did the hard question. I believe this is the case because students that label themselves as smart sometimes will rather want to take the easy route or fear of getting the question wrong and those that are praise want to challenge themselves to see if they can continue to get better. However, during placement, I can say that most of the students that I would label as smart were always the ones challenging themselves by doing hard questions whereas the students that struggled would want to do the easy questions. Regardless of what I've seen in versus research, I do believe that creating a growth mindset environment is beneficial no long run for all students


This is what I pulled from this week's activities! See you next time.