TA Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Supporting Productive Struggle in Learning Mathematics

Summary: Students learn through productive struggle. Students learn to become problem solvers when working through struggles on their own. When students learn things on their own, they may find a bigger connection to it. Productive struggle does not mean that teachers allow students to struggle endlessly without support. Teacher should support students to learn and problem solve through their struggle. Teachers may ask questions to guide or redirect students in their learning. 

Implications for Future Teaching: It is important that students learn how to explore academic concepts and learn rather than explicitly being told everything. I want to ask questions that help my students explore concepts and solve problems. 

2 Questions:

1. How long should teachers let students struggle before stepping in?

2. Are there any other resources that teachers can use to guide students through productive struggle? (Such as checklists?)

Comments

  1. Dr. NugentNovember 4, 2019 at 11:41 AM

    You want to give them plenty of time to process and work through the concepts, but also keep them from becoming frustrated. You could provide a check list of have you tried this, and this, and this, etc. You could also hang up some posters that encourage students to work together and persevere in working on difficult tasks. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Double impact: Mathematics and executive function

Double impact: Mathematics and executive function This article discusses  the goal of "double impact." This goal is to develop students mathematical proficiencies and executive  function skills at the same time. Executive function skills allow children to consider and change their own thinking. These are extremely important skills for children to have. The three categories of executive  function skills are inhibitory control, working memory, and attention shifting and cognitive flexibility. Inhibitory control is the idea that students need to stop to think about what they are doing before they instinctively solve a problem (possibly in the wrong way). Working memory means thats students have the capability to hold and process information they have read or learned. Cognitive flexibility is the capability of students to adjust their thinking and strategies to certain situations. All of these things can be adjusted or scaffolded to meet the levels and needs of
Read more

TA Chapters 6 & 7

TA Chapters 6 & 7 Chapter 6: Use and Connect Mathematical Representations Chapter 7: Facilitate Meaningful Mathematical Discourse Summary: Chapter 6 discusses the importance of using representations such as manipulatives and drawings to model mathematical concepts. These visual tools can help students better understand what they are doing before they start solving problems more abstractly. Chapter 7 discusses the importance of the methods of teaching mathematics. One of the major discourses discussed was discussions whether these are whole class, small group, or partner discussions. Discussing concepts can help students put their ideas into words leading to a better understanding of mathematics.  Implications for Future Teaching: One of the major things I got from these two chapters is the importance of variety in instruction. While models can really help visual learners, discussions can really help auditory learners. I want to make sure I am catering to the needs o
Read more

Curriculum Grade Level

Curriculum Grade Level 6th Grade Creating this year-long curriculum grade level plan was extremely beneficial. I think I learned a lot from this assignment. I knew there were many standards that need to be covered throughout the course of a year, but I was not aware that these standards are split into domains at each grade level. It was very helpful to use the chart and break down the domains and standards into quarters and semesters. It was very beneficial to plan activities and projects that align to each quarter and semester. This gave me an idea of how to begin planning a year-long curriculum in my future classroom. After watching the videos from the other groups, I realized how much the domains aligned across grade level. I discussed this more in my curriculum alignment blog. It was very beneficial to see how the domains and standards line up in the elementary grades. Part of this assignment was very frustrating, but overall I think the assignment is very helpful and is som
Read more