Observation Reflection

My experience in geometry and calculus one classes at Lane Tech was very insightful for my own personal views and learning of potential literacy strategies in my future room. The dynamics of the classroom were all very different and that impacted the way the students were taught, and the literacy strategies used.

The literacy strategies were pretty straight forward and basic in my opinion, but as I saw in working with my mini-lesson and everyone’s strategy presentations it’s a little hard to adapt the more “fun” literacy strategies for some of the needs in mathematics. My cooperating teacher modelled a lot of annotating and mathematical thinking. She would work through a problem and then have the students do a similar problem directly after. Then they would all go over the problem together as a class. During these discussions the teacher would use disciplinary discourse and emphasize the words she used when speaking. She would also ask for student definitions of vocabulary and reiterate both her definitions and the students. This daily repetition of the vocabulary reinforced the students use of it and while they were not always correct in their mathematical guesses, they did use the right language to talk about it. The students also had daily bell ringers they would work on to review what they learned the day before and use mathematical language. She also gave students guided notes to work through. When introducing new ideas, she would use the guided notes and her own colloquial definitions for the students to follow along. The students would then practice the use of this theorem or definition using other things they already learned in class. In some of the guided notes/practice problems given in calculus, she left the definition in the question, so students could refer to it when working on the problem. She also made it explicit what she was looking for which helped students understand what they needed to do and how to grasp concepts.

The classroom dynamics had an impact of the literacy strategies as well. All her classes were set up in to rows and every time students had to work on a problem, they were told they could work with the people around them or by themselves, with occasional group work. In the lower level math classes, the students would simply do their own work and then look at each other’s as opposed to working together. While this is a practice in the discipline (comparing and looking at multiple representations), emphasizing group work is equally important as it works on SEL, ensures math vocabulary is being used, and shows the students that math is hard work and sometimes you need to work with others to understand concepts. In the classes where the students participated, she used more mathematical language and explained more ideas (this is apparent in her first period geometry vs second). Often, the classes that didn’t participate would have punitive measures like homework. You could see the annoyance on the students faces, and in my opinion, it came from the class dynamic. In one class a student didn’t know the name of an absent student that sits right next to her. This was shocking to me as you could see there were some friendships in the class, but not a lot of group work or class activities. This may have been because I only observed for 4 days, but even in the group work there was not a lot of working together in the geometry classes. The calculus classes had more group work and were closer/more talkative groups.

Being at Lane taught me that it’s hard to make a positive classroom dynamic if you don’t do it at the beginning of the year. While the school is a top tier school, it is far too big for my liking. I had the opportunity to sit in on a geometry committee meeting and learned that the department head wanted to get rid of proofs in geometry entirely because it is not on the SAT. It was only teachers in the room, so they all showed their disagreement and found it appalling; particularly when geometry is one of the only high school math classes that uses proofs. Proofs are not just mathematical thinking, they assist in formulating arguments and logical assumptions, which is a skill in life. While the teachers made it seem like that department head probably won’t be around next year, I found it so strange that the HEAD of the MATH department wanted to get rid of proofs for a standardized test and because he thought the students would not use it unless they moved on to be mathematical majors in college. The politics behind being a top tier school are interesting and while the teachers try to make their classes as engaging as possible, it is hard to do in such a large school with so many pressures.