Curriculum Materials and Resources

My schools math department really plays by it's own rules in a sense because we are a charter school. We don't really do anything along with the other public schools in our area. We are the alternative to the traditional public school. RPA is the Redmond Proficiency Academy is proficiency based so the students are required to meet the standards that all other students in the public schools are supposed to meet, but it is required for all of our students to meet each individual standard instead of having to pass a class where all of the standards are lumped in to one grade.

There are only two math teachers at RPA and RPA uses moodles in all of their classes which are basically class websites that can be accessed by students and teachers. Both teachers have all of their lessons, powerpoints, homeworks, and extra practice assignments on their websites. The teacher that I work closest with records all of his lectures and posts them online as well so that students have no excuse to not know what is going on. He also has Khan Academy pages set up for each lesson which students use often. We use a program called WizIQ to record the lectures and it shows what we write, say, and video of the classroom. Every student can access any lecture or anything they may need for class to stay on track. It is great because parents can access their child's grades and see where they need to be in class. It helps them to get involved and keep their child on track if their child struggles to do so on their own. This is especially true for younger high school students.

I have started a Facebook and a Twitter for my classes which one of the math teachers does as well. Students don't use it much, but especially the Facebook page you can use to send out updates on what is coming up in class, etc. so students will receive a live update of anything you want them to know assuming they check their Facebook often, which most of them seem to do every five minutes. My Twitter account for class is mostly for following other math related Twitter accounts. They are mostly too advanced for high school students, but I post things every once in a while that are pertinent to class and what we are working on.

Routine-Intro to New Topic

The topic that I taught was on completing the square. We have not worked on this yet, but had worked on converting previous forms of quadratic equations over the past few days. I figured that this was so different that it counted as a new topic. The video is just a recording off of the smart board. It was either see what I was writing or see the class, so I figured the writing was more important so you can make sense of it. I could only get it on youtube and not vimeo because my teacher has them all converted to youtube for her classes. I apologize if it is too long. It is a whole lesson. I needed the whole thing to send to a student who was out with a relative who passed.

My strengths were having students involved in the lesson rather than just lecturing them. I try to have them lead me through the lesson by asking leading questions. I observed student learning by asking a lot of questions to see how they were understanding. I also had about a half hour of students working on problems while I walked around observing so I could see how they were doing. I also checked for understanding by asking them to rate their understanding 1-3, 3 being the highest. There were only about five different students who were answering/asking questions. This is a very small class, only about 12 students. Even though you can't see the students, there are only probably two students that aren't engaged. That is easy to fall in to because this is my last class of the day so students are tired which makes it challenging. Addressing varied abilities did not come up much because most of the students are on the same page. The students who did not understand spoke up when needed and that was about as far as it went. My role in supporting learning was having students guide me through the lesson. One challenge I observed was getting students to participate early on. Since this is a small class late in the day it is pretty difficult at times to get this group to participate. I would probably revise this lesson by having students work on problems on their own more in the middle of the lesson so that they are getting a chance to try and can figure out whether they really understand what we are doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYwi2_lF-cU&feature=youtu.be