I am very passionate about mathematics education and it concerns me that students struggle so much with the concepts presented. Students often struggle with feeling anxiety in math, or feeling disconnected from it. I feel like more could and should be done about this problem in education. I decided to tackle this wicked problem by doing a bunch of research on why the problem exists, sending out a survey to my peers, colleagues, and students, doing even more research on ways to potentially solve these issues, and then I compiled all of my data in the presentation below. While I didn’t have as many respondents to my survey as I would have liked, I did learn a lot through this process. Not only did I learn how difficult it is to write a survey and consider all possible answers you might like to see, and the high degree at which students are still struggling to feel connected to mathematics and their instructors, but also that editing and compiling all of this information into a well thought out presentation is a difficult task! Overall, we will always have students that struggle with mathematics, but my biggest hope is that teachers will begin to instill in students a growth mindset, share innovative ideas for lessons with other educators, and begin to move mathematics education in a direction that is more applicable to students and their needs outside of the high school classroom. Resources:
Misura, M. (2021, December 16). Wicked Problems [Video].
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The past few months have been overwhelming, exciting, stressful, educational, and so many other adjectives. As a teacher, I had to remember how to be back in front of students five days a week. I had to remember how to be a student again because I started my graduate course work at Michigan State University. I am a food, cat, and board game lover. I got married over the summer, and while we have been together for many years, the whole changing your name process is confusing and time consuming! And most recently I learned that I will be adding mother to the list of things that I am. Another big piece of who I am as a person is a maker and creator. The projects I come up with for my students I try to be creative, and when I started making interactive notebooks with my students my creativity really flourished. Throughout my graduate courses so far, the most fun I have is when I get to create some piece of art - whether it was a remixed video, a sketch note video, an infographic, or discovering a new technology, the 3D printing pen, to share with my students - I get so inspired to create something unique. It doesn’t always come together exactly to plan, but most innovators need MANY attempts before they get it right. Take a look at my final creation for one of my classes below. I have been capturing 1 image each day for the past 3 years using the app - 1 second everyday. It is something I look forward to each January 1st to see a summary of the year I just had, along with all the years past that I have done this. It brings me so much joy, I would recommend it to anyone. Resources:
Misura, M. (2021, December 13). 74 seconds of my year [Video]. Based on experience design, the user should be able to flow, participate, and feel some sort of emotion based on the experience you are participating in (Chang School 2010). The experience of being in my classroom I would love to say has a flow - to how the class is run, but also how things are set up, students feel that they are participants in the learning and can participate with each other and I hope that all my students feel safe and comfortable when they enter my room. Take a little classroom tour below! I built a 2D and 3D model of my classroom in floorplanner.com so that I could play with the arrangements of my room to see if I could make better use of the space. My room is small and FULL. Most years I have at least one class that has 33 students, so I have to have the extra group of two student desks in the top right corner just in case. And my 15 - 18 year old students often complain about how cramped it is in my room. I can make it as cozy as I want by adding a carpet, lighting, covering up an unused chalkboard and having a space for all of our tools (and sometimes I get compliments from my students on this) but it isn’t always an inspiring or user-friendly space. I have my students in groups permanently because we collaborate on activities so frequently it would be silly to ask students to move their desks together every other day. Some days our activities are hands-on, however some days we need to access desmos.com (an online graphing calculator) to help us find patterns quickly, while taking notes at the same time and their desks are small and can’t always accommodate all of those tools at once. Having this type of collaboration is key to deep understanding and builds on 21st century skills that students need to develop. In the middle of each group I have a caddy holding supplies they may need (ruler, highlighters, scissors, glue, etc) for creating our interactive student notebooks and other activities, but with those plus the closeness of the desks caddies get knocked over often because of long legs. I don’t often sit at my desk- I try to move around the room and assist students or talk to students from different points in the room as often as possible, so in some ways I wish I could just have it in a separate room. The chalkboard on the left wall is unusable as the windows are directly across from it and the sun shines in on it and make it impossible to read, which tends to affect the whiteboards at the front of the room as well so mostly the shades have to stay closed. After taking all of these problems into consideration I started redesigning my room with no budget, only hopes in mind. I would love to have tables with comfortable rolling chairs for each student and an all-in-one computer or tablet for each group for easy, quick access to desmos (or any other web-based tool) whenever we need it. In addition I would like to have the option for students to sit at high-top tables as well, the 6 tables around the outside would be high tops, again with adjustable rolling chairs. Personally, as someone who is tall, the extra space this provides for my legs is so appreciated. I would add white boards all around the room, updated projectors also in multiple locations, and better window coverings so that the sun does not impede students' views of work on the boards or projectors and can still be enjoyed. Also adding in movable smaller whiteboards for students or myself to bring to a group and have them work out problems together or with me. I would love to add all these features to my classroom as we have seen in studies that taking into consideration the space we are learning in as a tool to enhance learning can benefit students greatly, if only we all had the means to do so. Resources:
Chang School. (2010, February 9). Tedde van Gelderen on experience design. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB4VFKn7MA4&feature=emb_logo Misura, M. (2019) Classroom Tour [Video]. Misura, M. (2021, December 7). Classroom views [Images]. Misura, M. (2021, December 7). Classroom Floorplans [Images]. Misura, M. (2021, December 7). Redesign Classroom [Images]. One of my favorite topics to teach is surface area and volume of 3 dimensional shapes because students can see how math comes to life. What better way to engage my students even more than by adding a MYNT3D printing pen to the mix so that they can truly become creators themselves! A project that I have done for years in my geometry class during this topic is to have my students create a ‘prism person’ where students create nets (2-dimensional representations of 3-dimensional prisms), cut them out, tape them together, and create some really interesting characters. This seemed like the perfect lesson to use my printing pen for as students often struggle with cutting, taping, making their prism person stay together, and creating a net that will completely come together. My first draft of this lesson went through a lot of edits and received a lot of feedback as any good lesson should! See my feedback below. I also was tasked with giving my classmates in CEP 811 feedback on their lessons through two different lenses - intersectionality and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Reading through my feedback and giving feedback through those lenses gave me a lot to think about as I started to revise my lesson plan. Considering that students may struggle with fine motor skills would make it a challenge to complete the task and the ever looming difficulty of convincing students who do not love math that completing this task has value to them. It was also interesting to read one of my classmates' lessons that was for an English class that integrated math and CAD (computer-aided design) into his lesson and gave me inspiration to add a writing component to my lesson. After looking through my combined feedback the biggest thing I knew I needed to create was a rubric. Having clear guidelines for my students and myself as to what needs to be accomplished was always lacking in past years of completing this assignment. In addition to that, extending their learning outside of just surface area, volume, and characteristics of prisms was an excellent suggestion from one of my classmates. I incorporated both of these aspects into my final lesson plan. Overall the basic outline and flow of completing the task remained the same. On top of considering my professor and peers' feedback, we were also asked to consider research articles that support our task, or could enrich our task. In an article from NCTM, or National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, by Melinda Eichhorn et.al that focuses on using UDL to build the optimal learning environment for learning she mentions that “UDL,..., provide(s) students with options to access challenging tasks within the curriculum” (Eichhorn 2019 p.263). This convinced me to keep part of the old assignment (paper prism people) as another option or another viewpoint of creating a prism. I also created a pop-up-like book for students to pull on strings to make the nets come together. Another article, Exploring differences in primary students’ geometry learning outcomes in two technology-enhanced environments: dynamic geometry and 3D print, focused on specifically using a 3D printing pen as opposed to using an applet to simply view 3-dimensional objects to learn about their different characteristics. The findings of this study were very interesting. Overall the study concluded that while students using the dynamic geometry tools alone performed better on their posttest, the students using the 3D printing pen had more significant retention of the material as another posttest was given much later (Ng et. al. 2020). Using this information I decided to also add in a desmos activity so that students could visualize the objects on a computer to try to give even more options while including a digital aspect, for students to better visualize and understand the task. Overall, after considering multiple viewpoints, getting tons of feedback, and supporting any changes with research to back it up, I feel that this activity is in such a better place for my students. In an ideal world I would have 32 printing pens, the filament for my students to create to their heart's content, and it would be May so that I could do this activity tomorrow! Resources:
Misura, M. (2018). Prism People [Image]. Misura, M. (2021, November 29). Lesson Plan Feedback [Images]. Misura, M. (2021, December 3). Lesson Plan FInal [Images]. Misura, M. (2020, May). Net Pop Ups [Image]. Eichhorn, M et. al. (2019). Building the Optimal Learning Environment for Mathematics. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 112(4) 262-267. https://doi-org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/10.5951/mathteacher.112.4.0262 Ng, O., Shi, L., & Ting, F. (2020). Exploring differences in primary students’ geometry learning outcomes in two technology-enhanced environments: dynamic geometry and 3D printing. International Journal of STEM Education. https://stemeducationjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40594-020-00244-1 |
AuthorMarissa McGregor, high school math teacher extraordinaire. I love my husband, daughter, and family dearly. Archives
August 2022
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