Fig. 342a

As someone who has spent years tutoring mathematics, but not having taught math in the public school setting/formal school classroom, I found this term studying secondary math instruction methods engaging. I was excited to have learnt about the various methods of engaging students, particularly through interdisciplinary investigations, such as math and art projects. Over the course of this term, I spent time rediscovering my past and current identity as a mathematical person, as I have not pursued mathematics in several years. Many of my assumptions about the learning of mathematics stems from my experiences as a math learner in high school and university. I recognize the journey ahead to broaden my experiences in the teaching and learning of mathematics.  I was also able to draw parallels and differences between the New Zealand Mathematics Curriculum, which I studied under, and the previous, current, and incoming BC curriculum. This course, along with attending the BCAMT confe...

Micro-teaching in a three teacher team proved to be very challenging, particularly with the short time restraint. In the feedback forms, we received are largest proportion of criticism in content and timing. The two are inter-related as we made errors in estimating how much time each activity would take. The first segments of the lesson took much more time than anticipated, particularly reviewing and explaining an earlier concept from a hypothetical previous lesson. (Our students weren’t sure how to respond.) A helpful comment noted that that we could have done a review as an entire class, rather than a peer activity. In hindsight, perhaps a conceptual review rather than a calculation would have sufficed. A positive comment we received was that we distinguished between simple and compound interest concepts well, although I can definitely think of better ways (noted below.) The difficulty in this situation was then to adapt the plan on the spot. A possible adaptation was to scrap th...