Manjeet Mahal
MAED 314
Response to “Using Research to Analyze, Inform, and Assess Changes in Instruction”
Heather Robinson’s article is about why and how she changed her teaching methods during her fifth year of teaching. During her fifth year Robinson experienced many professional changes: she transferred to a new school and she entered graduate school to get her masters. During her first four years of teaching Robinson was good at her job: her students were able to do their homework and assignments with some ease, and they were achieving fairly good grades on her quizzes and exams. However, her students were not very successful on the final exam. Students who had excellent marks going into the final exam sometimes failed the exam. Moreover, after videotaping herself teaching, Robinson realized that she spent most of her time lecturing. Her lectures involved regurgitating the textbook and they were not engaging or intriguing for students. Sometimes at the end of a unit Robinson would include an activity, but, overall, her lessons involved lectures and were very teacher-centered. After watching this video and examining her students’ final exam marks, Robinson realized that she had to change her teaching methods. If she did not then her students’ understanding would not improve.
Robinson’s first step towards changing was decreasing the amount of lecturing that she did. By examining her previous years of teaching, Robinson realized that lecturing resulted in her students contributing less to the lesson. Moreover, she did not want her students to get the idea that math just involved learning skills so they could do well on exams – she wanted her students to understand and appreciate math. So to reduce lecturing time, Robinson limited herself to lecturing for only 60 minutes/week. Furthermore, Robinson used two strategies during every class to motivate her students. The first strategy was starting the class off with a question that provided a focus for that day’s lesson. The second strategy involved using strategies to get students’ interested and prepared for answering the question. Furthermore, she used the lesson activities and group activities throughout her lesson to keep the students interested. Hence, by getting the students more involved in the lesson by asking them questions and getting them to do activities, Robinson made her lessons more student-centered.
Robinson also implemented change by having her students think at a higher level. This involved her having to change her quizzes and tests. Robinson changed her quizzes from just containing lower-order questions to containing a mixture of lower-order and higher-order questions. After giving her “new” quiz to her students for the first time, Robinson realized that her students were not equipped to answer these higher-level questions. However, her students’ marks on these quizzes started improving after they became familiar with these higher-level questions from doing their “deeper” thinking class activities, and homework and in-class assignments.
Moreover, Robinson promoted change by supporting student-student discussion. This was very difficult for Robinson to do because she never liked having a noisy classroom because she felt students would never be able to learn in such an environment. Nevertheless, Robinson went forward with supporting student-student discussion by including group activities into the lesson. She also used the “Think-Pair-Share” strategy to get students involved in understanding the topic. The jigsaw was also a very useful strategy to get students involved in mathematical discussion. Hence, Robinson acted more as a facilitator in her classroom and the students were responsible for their own learning.
Overall, Robinson found the changes she made to be worth it. As a result of these changes, students who never used to speak in class started contributing to mathematical discussions. Moreover, students starting losing their fear of being wrong or asking for help from a class member. Robinson found that with the changes that she implemented, students were not just practicing a skill – they were also thinking logically about the concepts and coming to rational conclusions. The students were also more interested in math and were excited to come to math class since she made the changes to her teaching. Additionally, after making the changes, fewer students failed the final exam. Therefore, the changes that Robinson made to her lesson proved to be very beneficial for her students.
I found this article very interesting because it shows that lecturing does not result in students really understanding the concepts that they are taught. I agree with Robinson that having lessons student-centered is more beneficial for the students. When I start teaching I want to incorporate the students into my lesson and I think this article gives some good ideas on how to do this. When I teach, I also want to include higher-level thinking questions on my quizzes and exams to make sure the students understand what is going on. However, I think it is important for the teacher to also lecture a little bit because I think that lecturing gives an overview of a topic. I would want to use a lecture to introduce a new topic and some new ideas, but then I would use class discussions and activities to get the students to further comprehend the topic. Overall, I liked this article because it reveals that you can be creative when teaching math.
No comments:
Post a Comment