Math Blog Year 2 Week 2

This second week of Mathematics class has continued with learning about Growth Mindset and the
impact that messages we are told about ourselves having a huge impact on forming our thoughts.
Both mindset and messages affects how you lead your life.

As teachers, we have the task to help students understand which type of mindset guides their thinking.
For those with a fixed mindset, it is important to help them move towards learning from mistakes to
improve their skills. There is no one correct answer, but there are multiple ways to solve a problem.
Having the students persevere until they come to understanding will help the students become more
independent and confident in their learning.

I am finding the videoclips with Jo Boaler very informative. Jo Boaler also talked about the messages
that you carry in your head as being important. It would be better for teachers to give students feedback
that their teacher believes in them and knows that they can succeed, as opposed to being able to do the
work because they are smart.

The messages that other people give you can affect what you think that you can do. What you say to
students really stays with them and it is important that a teacher chooses their words carefully. Students
look to their teachers and their feedback so what you say makes an impact.  Notes with positive
comments and descriptive feedback will go a long way in the classroom and may solve issues that
may arise, such a lack of motivation. As a teacher, it is so important to keep this in mind when
teaching and to give descriptive feedback that tells the students what they can do and what needs to
be done, so that they can believe in their own ability

In class, we watched the Cathy Fosnot video on Conceptual Understanding and Procedural Fluency.
Some people are trying to decide which one is more important, but she clearly states that they are both
important and they build on one another. She also said, that in order to get the fluency established, you
really need to work on the development of mathematics. Students need to understand the number and
the relationships in number concepts.  You need to teach the procedures with understanding the
concepts. It used to be that educators thought that students needed to learn the basic facts first and
then the algorithm, and Fosnot said that we left out the “landscape” of the math. Teachers need to take
a big picture view of learning math so that students understand the ways in which facts work together.
My question from watching the video is “How do we teach these things that were being left out?”

One of the documents on our reading list this week was Paying attention to mathematics education.
It was written in 2011 and provided seven foundational principles of improvement in mathematics.

These principles are a guide to planning and implementing in teaching and learning mathematics.
This document like the other Ministry documents seem to be based on good research and are very
relevant to the classroom, but yet EQAO scores remain low in Math. I’m wondering why this is
happening and why the information in these documents is not implemented in many classrooms. Most
of the classrooms where I have volunteered and had practicum seem to teach math in the traditional
way. I’m going to make an effort to use the information from this course and Ministry documents in
my teaching and hope to make a difference in math learning.