Week 3- Chapter 11

I have never seen a student or teacher read their textbook prior to starting a lesson or even after for that matter. Often time, students view teachers as an audio textbook or walking textbooks that splits (teaches) out the information they need to know.  Textbooks are only used when student have homework questions to solve. Encouraging students to read a mathematics textbook could be a little frightening for students for several reasons, 1. Math textbook are written differently than an English book or a novel and they are not written in a friendly and exciting way for encouraging students to actually want to pick it up and read it. After reading the vignette of Mr. Howard’s class, I noticed how he incorporated reading of the textbook into the lesson. Instead of the information coming from his teaching, he made the lesson student centered, so that the lesson was derived from them and their textbook.

Mr. Howard cleverly used the prereading, during reading, and postreading approach. Students read headings of a textbook section and wrote what they already knew about the topic and generated questions (prereading), then they had to interpret the information they were read from the textbook and attempt to answer the questions they came up with (during reading), and lastly had to refer to the Big Ideas of the lesson and write about what they learned and whether or not they can give examples of where the big ideas take place (postreading). I would love to see this approach being used in a classroom setting to see if it really works. I have only been exposed to seeing students and teachers use the math textbooks when it came to solving questions from it. Furthermore, I really wonder how this approach would work for students with learning disabilities, IEPs, and especially ELL learners who often times have trouble comprehending and verbalizing what they read. However, I agree with this practice because it can help students become more independent learners and take charge of their own learning. I would say this practice could work best with Honors students, and then again, I have never seen it done before.

After I read the brainstorming strategy, which allows students to share with a partner what they already know about a certain topic. Furthermore, it allows teachers to see which word or context students are struggling with. I found it really interested to read that using unrelated and unfamiliar context in mathematics reading helps students make sense of some mathematical concepts. I have seen this done in my CPD experience. I remember when my mentor was teaching students about complementary and supplementary angles. She made an unrelated connection between complementary angles and someone giving you a complement. She said complementary angles form 90 angles, when someone give you a nice complement you don’t slouch when you sit down, instead you sit up straight forming that L shape, which makes up 90 degrees. The connection she made between supplementary angles was with supplements such as vitamins. People take supplements to make everything in their body system “flow straight”, key word straight makes a 180 degree angles. She even made a second connection between supplementary and sleeping. When we sleep we lay down and we form a straight line. Students seem to catch up on this fairly quickly because they can relate it to their lives.

I also like the Prereading graph and display strategy, the authors explained that it is important for students to attempt to read graphs and displays before they read the related text. I have also seen my mentor teacher use this strategy in her class. When she introduced circle graphs, she showed her students three examples. They didn’t take any notes on it; they just had to talk about it without going in depth with the details written on the circle graph. Student predicted that the circle graph had a circle so somewhere along the lines they would use the property of a circle being 360 degrees. They read they titles and made predictions of how the data was collected. For example, one of the circle graphs was about three sports. Students predicted that it was probably conducted using a survey. They also predicted that it was probably about American sports played in school since they didn’t see soccer listed. I really enjoy hearing the students just make predictions just by looking at minimum information given to them. It really activated their prior knowledge and also allows the teacher to check for understanding.

I have to say the sketch the text strategy is my favorite since personally I am a very visual and kinesthetic learner. Sometimes, math can be abstract for some students; there are way too many steps and rules to follows. Maybe, if the student had a visual representation or create their own visual presentation of a mathematical problem it will allow them to understand the problem better. I have seen it done in my CPD as well. My mentor teacher was teaching customary unit conversions. Instead of just giving them the unit conversions from unit to unit, he instead drew out Mr. G. With the whole class, the came up with a visual representation of Mr. G. They drew a big Gallon shape, and with the Gallon they drew 4 quarts (shape of a milk bottle), and within each quart they drew 2 pints (shape of an ice cream pint) and within each pint they drew 2 cups. They went ahead and did the same thing to make Mr. G come alive using a different representation, They made Mr. G in an almost animated human body, where the Gallon made up the body, the quarts made up the arms and legs, the pints made up the palms and feet and the cups made up the fingers and toes of Mr. G. They really liked this representation of the customary unit. Personally found it very interesting and fun and I would always remember the liquid customary unit conversion just by drawing Mr. G.