Keep Student Minds Churning To Deepen Their Learning

This week as I continue my path in math, opened my eyes to a variety of concepts that I see valuable as teacher. The main theme of the week that I noticed from class, during the webinar, textbook readings, and online modules was to challenge our students to allow them to think deeply and deepen their learning.

We can promote a growth mindset by differentiating the content, process, and product of a task which parallel tasks allows us to do. The content is the task they are given to do. Parallel tasks basically consists of giving the students choice by providing them 2 or more options in how they can solve a problem. The different questions provided to the students ask the basic same idea but are different ways to actually solve them. I love this idea as it gives students choice - and students love choice! It allows them to choose the problem that they feel comfortable solving or gives them the opportunity to challenge themselves and deepen their learning. There are a number of ways the students can solve these problems representing their process. Lastly, there can be more than one product of these tasks which challenges students to find more than one solution if they can.

Math Class (2017, Sept 18).
Creating Common and Scaffolding Questions [Personal Image].

In addition, these tasks can be consolidated by proposing scaffolding questions to the students. It challenges the students to think about their math process or other possible solutions and gain a greater understanding of the concept. In class we were given the task to create both common questions that a student may ask about our problem we chose in addition to scaffolding questions to allow students to reflect on the mathematical components of solving the problem. This is a great reflection piece for students to reflect on their learning and the math concept.

I was pleased to participate during our first webinar this week as I learned about Math Inquiry from Teresa. She explained many valuable points about why this is important to include in the classroom and how it can be orchestrated. Allowing students to wonder helps deepen their learning as they think beyond what is being taught to them gaining an interest and curiosity. One point that stood out to me is that students need to have a general understanding of what is being taught first before being open to question and analyze concepts. This makes sense as once they have an understanding of something, they may be more curious or be able to think more deeply about that concept.

Our online modules also followed this trend of deepening student learning through various ways. It is important for teachers to understand how valuable mistakes are. Creating challenging and open ended questions make mistakes more probable from our students. Therefore, through this process, they will learn to overcome these challenges and apply different strategies to solve the problems. As a result, students will learn more from this process. Another important concept from the module is to allow students time to complete their work. It is shown that those who are slower at doing math are not necessary bad at it. In fact, those who are slow may just need time to make connections and apply their understanding to solve problems. Thus, even though a challenge can be frustrating, our students will learn more from resolving their mistakes through critical thinking.


via GIPHY