Another class has ended..week 6 CED 525

As another class ends I feel like I have grown academically within my teaching career. The thing I take with me that I find to be the most relevant is the learning techniques that apply advanced organizers to improve the classroom experience. I also found the unit on cues, questions, and hypothesis to be a very useful technique that allows student engagement rather than the daily teacher lecture. I will take these two techniques and apply them to daily lesson plans, which I feel will encourage student learning and academic growth. I appreciate each tool and technique learned during these past 6 weeks and I look forward to growing further in my teaching career!

Hypothesizing...

I must admit I love this concept and it makes a great tool in presenting new material to the students. Most students are not allowed the freedom to critical think about a new subject when it is introduced. I like to start a new unit with a moment of critical thinking and allowing the student to present these thoughts so that together we can come to a correct solution. In math most students are told to follow the steps to solve an equation but what we fail to do is to teach them why we are following these steps and where they are derived from. However, in hypothesizing the students and I are able to build these steps by testing the guesses against the problems and in turn they develop a theory of why we solve equations the way we do. I absolutely love this tool and I hope most teachers will adapt this technique into their own lesson plans.

Homework and Practice

As all students know, homework is that dreaded topic we all know and hate to discuss, it can be time consuming and difficult to complete if the student does not find it relevant. Homework should be a way to help students develop and apply the material they been learning in the classroom. Homework is simply a tool for practicing new material and maintain prior knowledge. In some cases it can become a tiresome routine that will not benefit the student because the homework can become irrelevant when it is designed to engage the student. Timely homework assignments tend to disengage the learner and as a result there is no actual benefit of the assignment because there is no active learning going on. The teacher has to discover ways that can allow the student to practice the material in a timely effective method, which may include assigning a daily homework task that is short yet effective which allows them to use their own creative thinking to conclude the task at hand. In the case of the middle school math teacher, it can be productive to assign a 20 problem assignment that covers each area including accessing prior knowledge to keep each method fresh in their minds. This task can be time consuming for the teacher, however the benefits of configuring an assignment that will allow the students to complete without losing focus will allow them the practice needed to master a subject.