Interview Q & A's

I interviewed my practicum teacher Brian Miller. He has been teaching for about fifteen years and his teaching philosophy is very inquiry based. He feels that students would rather learn through doing than by listening to him lecture all day and he has had a lot of success with this. His classes have far above average test scores compared to the rest of the school. Here is what he had to say about these questions. 1. How does the CMP curriculum align with the national Common Core and NCTM standards? The NCTM aligns pretty much exactly with the state standards because they come from the NCTM standards. They use the CMP textbooks and those cover all of the state standards (but they have to skip around to different grade level books sometimes to cover all of the state benchmarks), so he believes that they all align pretty closely 2. Numerous students are a year or more behind in the basics. How does one address the needs of these students on a daily basis so they can get up to grade level and also experience success in the inquiry to investigation philosophy of the CMP? Math lab is a class that is available to students who are struggling and it is offered in place of a normally required music class. Math lab is taken along with the standard 6th, 7th, or 8th grade math class and they focus on the aspects of math that these students are struggling with and going over concepts learned that day or in previous days of class. Students in math lab are recommended by teachers from the previous year or students who are not meeting the standards on the OAKS tests are usually required to take it. The school also offers before and after school tutorial that is available to all students. It takes place three mornings and three afternoons a week. 3. What is the role of homework (and accountability) in the CMP? The role of homework in the CMP is to make sure that students can do problems that we have done in class on their own. They also do extension problems that are basically extra credit, so it also shows you which students are willing to put in extra work. Students are rarely given time to work on homework in class, so it really does show you what students can do on their own (assuming they aren't working on it with friends or copying). 4. CMP Investigations compose of small-groups (pair-share, teamwork, cooperative learning).Describe several classroom management techniques that ensure all students are actively engaged. Eg, how are individual roles established? Accountability (Group, individual)? Ongoing assessment(s) and checking for understanding? Mr. Miller keeps students actively engaged in class by being energetic and funny. His students love him and they feed off his energy. He also is constantly walking around the classroom and checking on students to make sure they are staying on task and understanding everything. Students ask him and their peers for help when they are working on assignment and he feels that letting students work together is a good way to keep them having fun because they are interacting and not getting bored. He also offers a lot of one on one help for students who seem to be off task or copying answers and not doing the work. It lets those students know that he is watching them and he is usually able to stop those things before they become a problem.

Inquiry and CMP Research

The reasoning behind inquiry based learning is that when students are at the center of their learning, they become more involved and will learn more. Students learn based on their own curiosities, interests, and perspectives. Students are controlling where their learning is headed in a sense because their learning is more organic so the student feels like they are discovering and not being told what they are learning. This process makes learning more enjoyable for the student and helps them to have a greater sense of accomplishment in their learning. I feel that the CMP model is inquiry based because we use the CMP textbooks in the classroom that I am working in now and they are relatively inquiry based. A lot of the lessons are about discovery of concepts. My teacher I am working with is very inquiry based and he only does a small portion of lecturing each day (maybe 3 minutes( and the rest of the learning is done through assignments and activities. Most of his students are doing well and I believe he only has six students failing in all six of his classes. He even had a very impressive student discover a way to easily find a fraction in between two given fractions (add the numerators and denominators together and your resulting fraction will be between the two) that wasn't in the book and neither he or I had ever heard before.

Closure and Anticipatory Set

The closure section in a lesson plan provides context for the lesson and also reviews what the students have learned during the lesson. It is a good opportunity for the teacher to add insight to the knowledge the students have just received. In math specifically, I like it when I can relate what we have learned to what students may learn in the future. Students are more likely to remember things if there is a sense of importance to it, so it is good if you can give them a reason to remember what they have learned. Relating a lesson to a career path or a future class the student may take can make more of an impact in the mind of the student so they may be more likely to recall what they have learned. As boring as it is, even saying that the concept will come up on a final exam or something like that can do the trick. Anticipatory set is the introduction of your lesson to students that includes their motivation for learning. This is very similar to closure in a lesson, but it involves more background information for the student. In a sense it is the attention grabber for the lesson and gets the student interested, so it needs to be appealing to the crowd you are teaching. Obviously, sometimes learning is a touch sell for students so it is good to relate concepts they will learn to something they may be interested. Relate statistics lessons to sports or something like that is a good way to interest a younger group. http://k6educators.about.com/od/lessonplanheadquarters/g/closure.htm http://www.edulink.org/lessonplans/anticipa.htm

Practicum-Sharing a lesson

Last week I taught a lesson about similarity. We talked about similarity for a few minutes, basically that they needed to be proportional to each other or the same to be similar. After our discussion, I gave them a worksheet where there were plotted points on a graph that created a hat. There was a table on the worksheet that had hat transformations (for example: Hat 2-(x+3, y+2), Hat 3-(.5x, .5y), Hat 4-(3x, 2y), and so on) and the students had to fill in the table by writing in the new points and then graphing them and determining which ones were similar to the original hat. My main strategy was learning by discovery because I basically told them what similarity was and then let them work on the worksheet. We did a lot of class discussions and group discussions (the students are at tables of four people) trying to figure out which hats were similar. The lesson objective was to get students to see what similarity looks like and how to determine which shapes are similar. The things that worked were the group discussions because I didn't give them a whole lot of information and they needed to clarify what similarity was with each other. Some students got it right away and others took time. The worksheet was great because they got to work on some graphing stuff that we had been doing and transformations along with the new lesson we were doing. I checked for understanding through the discussions and walking around and talking to groups. I also did something that my teacher does, which was make students turn in a release question on a small piece of scratch paper. The question was "which hats are similar and why" from the worksheet. They turn it in on the way out and I can see if all of the students understood the lesson and concept of similarity. That allows me to see if I need to clarify anything the next day or if we can move on to the next thing. I really liked this idea. If I were to reteach the lesson, I would changed the transformations to be more different because three of the five hats were the same hat moved into a different position and not a different size so they didn't really get a lot of work with similarity because most of them were exactly the same. I would also have gone over similarity more in the beginning and used more examples because I think that some people were lost early on because I didn't go over it enough.