Final Blog Reflection

At the start of this program and at the start of this course, I was definitely unsure if I had what it takes to be a teacher. However, I feel I've grown some confidence in myself throughout the semester. One article that stuck out to me was the one about being a reflective teacher and how things won't go right the first, second, third, or tenth time (or so on) teaching, and that's ok as long as we don't give up and learn from it. I've kept in mind to being reflective about situations that occur that I've even started up a journal for myself to record incidents that happened (during my practicum school visits) that didn't go as well as I had hoped. I use it to reflect back on what happened and how I could have handled it better for next time. 

Other things I thought were interesting and I took away was the topic of marks and grades on students' learning in school. As a student myself, I always knew grades and marks gave students a lot of stress and took the fun out of learning, so the idea of removing marks and changing up how students are assessed was a very entertaining idea, especially how it links with my inquiry project on the Thinking Classroom. The inquiry project was a great way to delve deeper into a teaching method/idea that I was interested in and I would not have had the chance to witness it firsthand and gotten real world feedback on it without this course to open up the opportunity. Being able to learn more about the Thinking Classroom, I will definitely be incorporating it into my own teaching to try and see how it goes. 

Thank you for the fun experiences throughout the course and happy holidays!

Inquiry 1 Project Reflection

Before this inquiry project, my only exposure to the Thinking Classroom was very surface level and I'd mainly only heard the term floating around without knowing a lot of details about it. Hence, I thought the inquiry project was a great way to research and learn more about it. I was able to read Peter Liljedahl's book, Building Thinking Classrooms, and learn that there was so much more to the idea of Thinking Classrooms than just working in groups at whiteboards. 

I liked the real world contact aspect of the project because although reading about the Thinking Classroom can give a lot of information and insight, being able to experience it in-person gave a more personal and fresh perspective into how the theory plays out in a real life setting. Since the Thinking Classroom is made to be a framework and not something to copy exactly as written, it was really interesting to learn about the similarities and differences on how different teachers implemented and/or modified the ideas written by Peter Liljedahl. One aspect I found that was very different (but very fascinating) from a traditional math classroom was the assessments in a Thinking Classroom. Perhaps I'll look deeper into assessments and assessment styles in my Inquiry 2 project. 

Additionally, simply from reading about the Thinking Classroom and the reasoning and research behind it, I really liked the concept of a Thinking Classroom, and I also thought it was a fun way to approach math teaching and learning. Thus, I was very surprised by the number of negative responses by students towards the Thinking Classroom implementation. After delving into students' reasoning on why, many of them responded that it was because this style of teaching did not provide them with notes that they could use to study from/with. However, Liljedahl mentions not providing students with notes from the teacher because it causes students to mimic rather than think for themselves, which I agree with. What I'm curious about is that even though the teacher didn't provide notes for the students, given the students are doing many problems each class on the whiteboards, couldn't they write notes from those problems they solved? I discussed the issue about notes with a teacher running a Thinking Classroom and we agreed that students seem to struggle with writing their own (effective) notes (or even knowing that they should be writing their own notes). I'm curious to see if students' opinions will change if they learned how to take notes on their own - maybe using Liljedahl's graphic organizer idea for note-taking will be a useful idea to teach students. 

Overall, I hope to research and learn more in the next Inquiry 2 project!