Grant and Zeichner’s Article Sept. 14

Grant and Zeichner’s article “On Becoming a Reflective Teacher” made me think a lot about the teaching profession and there are a few points that really intrigued me. I was interested by the article mentioning the amount a choice a teacher faces on a day to day basis and over the course of their careers. From the choice of teaching style, instructional values and views, to which content to stress as being critical, to how we teach to specific groups of children and even our attitude as to how we go about teaching. Futhermore, what this article discusses is relevant to modern teaching as well. Teachers have a lot of impact on the lives of their students. The theme of the impact that teachers have on their students resonated with me becuase I am a math tutor and have seen this impact firsthand. “Reflective action” was the vocabulary in the article that stood out to me the most. I don't believe that there is one approach that solves teaching and learning, however, there are best practices in each style, pedagogy, etc. that can be used to make the classroom the best, more inclusive learning space it can possibly be.

Final Reflection on EDUC 450

I learned a lot about different styles of education especially embodied, multi/cross-disciplinary, and outdoor learning. I had never experienced many of these styles of education before so it was an informative and enlightening experience. One of my favourite aspects of this course was the learning about multi/cross-disciplinary pedagogies. For instance, in one class we learned about rope making, weaving, and braiding. I tried a traditional form of bag weaving which was a really interesting experience because it was a indigenous form of weaving from another part of the world and it was challenging! Figuring out how it was meant to be done and what the pattern might be took me a good portion of the class, but by the end of the class I had settled on a pattern and was able to make substantial progress on a bag. This was an interesting activity because there elements of math (the pattern) but also Indigenous ways of knowing, critical thinking, and problem solving involved; so much of which is involved in mathematics in general. I also really enjoyed the inquiry project aspect of the course as it satisfied my desire for autonomy, choice and relatedness. I think my main suggestion for improving this course would be to focus more on the inquiry project side of things and allow students more exploration in an area of their choosing. This was the strongest part of the course for me, I enjoyed the research, the collaboration with other students, and coming up with ideas about my subject area.

Final Project Slides and Reflection

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qLdufvO58D6oKedjwJ7fSl9MCZEUAqd50kt-JeygpmM/edit?usp=sharing

Reflection

During this inquiry project I learned a lot about my own position on what makes math interesting through reflection and consideration of my own math journey, while also simultaneously learning about the educational systems of highly successful countries Finland and Singapore and their techniques to achieve such success. Did they care about student interest in the subject? Or was their goal only to get high scores on PISA testing? It turns out that interest in mathematics is a foundational principal in their education systems and I learned how they define 'interest' and the purpose it serves in their system. There are so many interesting aspects of this project that I discovered along the journey. If I were to consider what to take forward into future inquiry, I would want to investigate more into how our education system is fundamentally structured to support student interest, how higher mathematics could be integrated into the high school curriculum, and I would possibly want to dive deeper into the education system of Finland. This project lead me in many interesting directions, many of which I did not expect. For example, I did not expect to feel so strongly about integrating higher mathematics into the high school classroom, but when I thought about it over an extended period of time, the more it seemed to make sense. If we want students to be interested in math, then we need to make math relevant to them and give them the most interesting problems mathematics has to offer. Many of the concepts in calculus, abstract algebra, geometry, etc. can be broken down, simplified and made approachable for unseasoned mathematicians. Many of the concepts in these topics already connect to the fundamentals our curriculum is based on. From this point in my inquiry, I am very interested in pursuing inquiry into the technological revolution of education and what that means for the framework of our school systems.

Dec. 2 Exit Slip

 I enjoyed learning about the change ringing practices and how it relates to combinatorics. It's a very practical problem that we could give to students and ask them to figure out how a team of people ringing bells could simply move through the various combinations. The answer of course is the end switch, middle switch algorithm which enables easy navigation of combinations. I think this would make an excellent activity to explore combinatorics but also learn about mathematics in everyday life and how intertwined mathematics is in seemingly simple activities like ringing bells. Furthermore, this could be a great way to introduce braiding and weaving patterns in general which you could connect to Indigenous education which I think essentially is our job as educators, to facilitate students making connects and expanding their intellectual horizons.