Teaching strategies

This week in class we participated in a math congress. Mathematical communication and discussion is essential for learning mathematics because as we communicate we are able to reflect on, clarify, and expand our ideas. The math congress was a great exercise that began with the teacher assigning students to work in a group and work together on chat paper to create a solution to the problem that the teacher assigns. The poster should have ideas that are well thought and should present important strategies and concepts that were used to solve their problems. While the students are working away on their problems, it is a great time for the teacher to walk around the class and assess how the students are doing. In our Math congress in class Pat was walking around as we were working on our problems and she got a great idea of how everyone was doing in regard to their understanding of the problem and she was able to see the different mathematical strategies and the different ideas that each of our groups were working towards. I can definitely see myself using a math congress in my classroom because I think that it is extremely important to have discussions in math and if students are not comfortable discussing mathematics with the teacher during the lesson, this gives them the opportunity to discuss ideas and concepts with their peers and gives them the chance to collaborate critically.

As we finished up working on Joel’s Kitchen problem, we posted our solutions around the class and has a gallery walk. This is a unique strategy that has studnets move from station to station to view everyone else’s work. the gallery walk allows students to get into discussion about the problem in a mode of active engagement. It allowed us to see the many different strategies and methods that others took, which helped us gain a deeper understanding of Joel’s problem. I like this strategy a lot because it helps the students understand that there is more than one way to solve mathematical problems and this is beneficial because some individuals may not get how to do a mathematical problem one way, but they understand how to do it another. The gallery walk is also beneficial to teachers because it allows the teacher to monitor the classroom and assess how the students are collaboratively working to understand the mathematical concepts.

After the gallery walk, it is a good strategy to have students return to their original groups to discuss things that they noticed and to reflect on the overall process. Students can then decide if they would like to add things to their original problem and think about whether or not they would have approached the problem in the same way, with their newly acquired information. This gives students opportunities to come to final conclusion on what they saw and discussed and it also gives the teacher the chance to assess the overall classroom’s understanding of the problem and allows the teacher to provide feedback.