What I learned during my Student Teaching at Holt Ninth Grade Campus
![Picture](/uploads/1/7/9/8/17983947/9482619.jpg?360)
Pictures from the Roger Rabbit Murder Mystery Lesson
During the 2012-2013 school year, I got the opportunity to be an intern teacher for geometry at Holt Ninth Grade Campus. Starting on the first day of school, I had full responsibility of our fourth hour and they were my class until the day my internship was completed on April 25, 2013. It is extremely difficult to list all the things I learned during the internship, but if I had to pick the top three things I learned I would have to say that it would be the importance of assessing your students daily, creating tasks that excite students about mathematics, and creating an atmosphere in the classroom where students are not afraid to be wrong and aren’t afraid to ask questions.
My mentor teacher used skill checks, similar to quizzes, on each learning objective within a unit. These skill checks happened once a week and had questions that directly related to the students’ understanding of the objective. The students would be given 4 different levels of understanding on those objectives, they would either receive either a “Ready to Teach”, “Got it”, “On my way” or “Need Help” depending on how they answered the questions on the skill check. Before students turned in their skill check they also got the opportunity to do a self-assessment and they circled which level they received. Over time, students became more accurate on their level of understanding of each objective. Before each skill check, I either gave students exit slips or warm-up activities that would help them practice each learning objective. Most of the time we collected the slips and were able to assess how many students really understood the concepts. Knowing how students understand the objectives is very important when teaching the material in class. In order to teach your students well, you must understand how they understand the objectives and common misconceptions they may have. This helped me change the pace depending on the students’ needs. I also gained knowledge on how the students thought about the objectives. These are just a few of the many benefits of frequently assessing students.
Another goal I had during my student teaching was engaging students in mathematics. I addressed this goal by creating exciting mathematical tasks for students to gain deeper knowledge for the topic. Many of these tasks involved story problems or hands on ways to discover mathematical ideas. During the trigonometry unit, I was able to set up the classroom like a murder-mystery scene in the forest. I taped paper trees to the wall and had the outline of Roger Rabbit’s body on the floor. Students played the role of detectives and worked in teams to solve the murder mystery of Roger Rabbit. The murderer was hiding in his apartment in one of the trees of the forest. The students knew that trees are perpendicular to the ground. This helped them start the activity by drawing a right triangle that used the distance from the tree to Roger, the distance from the apartment to the base of the tree and the distance directly from Roger to the apartment. The students were then given the angle from Roger to the apartment in the tree and the distance from the base of the tree to Roger in order to find out possible heights of the apartment. The students were given more clues along the way and were able to eliminate possible apartments based on the mathematics they did and the clues they were given. They ended with a decoding worksheet in order to find that Roger was killed by their rival school’s mascot. Another task that I used involved the dimensions of carry-on luggage. While I was travelling over spring break, I was surprised to see that the dimension requirements of a carry-on were based on adding the three dimensions together, thus not based on the volume or surface area of the bag. I wanted the students to act as suitcase designers and think about how you would make the suitcase with the biggest volume. After we worked on that we used that maximized volume to not just make a rectangular prism suitcase, but also create suitcases that were cylinders, cones, prisms, and pyramids. The suitcase designers practiced working backwards to find the heights or area of the bases of the suitcases with the maximized volumes and were given other necessary information in order to solve the problem given to them.
The German mathematician, Georg Cantor, said, “In mathematics the art of asking questions is more important than solving problems.” I thoroughly agree with this quote, and I believe in order for students to feel comfortable to ask questions within a classroom, they must know and understand how their teacher cares about them and respects their ideas. I think that by getting to know about your students’ interests and thoughts they really open up to you and feel more comfortable talking to you. As a teacher it is really important to set that tone in your classroom and this year, I believe I did an excellent job making my students feel comfortable and cared for in my classroom. Students were not afraid to ask me questions about the learning objectives. After school I was available daily to help students and I believe this showed the students that I cared about their understanding of the concepts. We also read an article in the class discussing the importance of failing. Students had to take the article home and talk to their parents about the ideas within the article. The article explained that by failing, you are given the opportunity to learn from the mistakes you made. I think that it’s important for student’s to understand that learning from our mistakes makes us stronger and that although you may fail something, you have the opportunity to see that as a learning opportunity.
Throughout my student teaching I learned how to assess students understanding daily, use engaging mathematical tasks and show students the importance of asking questions and learning from our mistakes. I believe that these three things will really benefit me when I get the opportunity to teach my own class next year.
My mentor teacher used skill checks, similar to quizzes, on each learning objective within a unit. These skill checks happened once a week and had questions that directly related to the students’ understanding of the objective. The students would be given 4 different levels of understanding on those objectives, they would either receive either a “Ready to Teach”, “Got it”, “On my way” or “Need Help” depending on how they answered the questions on the skill check. Before students turned in their skill check they also got the opportunity to do a self-assessment and they circled which level they received. Over time, students became more accurate on their level of understanding of each objective. Before each skill check, I either gave students exit slips or warm-up activities that would help them practice each learning objective. Most of the time we collected the slips and were able to assess how many students really understood the concepts. Knowing how students understand the objectives is very important when teaching the material in class. In order to teach your students well, you must understand how they understand the objectives and common misconceptions they may have. This helped me change the pace depending on the students’ needs. I also gained knowledge on how the students thought about the objectives. These are just a few of the many benefits of frequently assessing students.
Another goal I had during my student teaching was engaging students in mathematics. I addressed this goal by creating exciting mathematical tasks for students to gain deeper knowledge for the topic. Many of these tasks involved story problems or hands on ways to discover mathematical ideas. During the trigonometry unit, I was able to set up the classroom like a murder-mystery scene in the forest. I taped paper trees to the wall and had the outline of Roger Rabbit’s body on the floor. Students played the role of detectives and worked in teams to solve the murder mystery of Roger Rabbit. The murderer was hiding in his apartment in one of the trees of the forest. The students knew that trees are perpendicular to the ground. This helped them start the activity by drawing a right triangle that used the distance from the tree to Roger, the distance from the apartment to the base of the tree and the distance directly from Roger to the apartment. The students were then given the angle from Roger to the apartment in the tree and the distance from the base of the tree to Roger in order to find out possible heights of the apartment. The students were given more clues along the way and were able to eliminate possible apartments based on the mathematics they did and the clues they were given. They ended with a decoding worksheet in order to find that Roger was killed by their rival school’s mascot. Another task that I used involved the dimensions of carry-on luggage. While I was travelling over spring break, I was surprised to see that the dimension requirements of a carry-on were based on adding the three dimensions together, thus not based on the volume or surface area of the bag. I wanted the students to act as suitcase designers and think about how you would make the suitcase with the biggest volume. After we worked on that we used that maximized volume to not just make a rectangular prism suitcase, but also create suitcases that were cylinders, cones, prisms, and pyramids. The suitcase designers practiced working backwards to find the heights or area of the bases of the suitcases with the maximized volumes and were given other necessary information in order to solve the problem given to them.
The German mathematician, Georg Cantor, said, “In mathematics the art of asking questions is more important than solving problems.” I thoroughly agree with this quote, and I believe in order for students to feel comfortable to ask questions within a classroom, they must know and understand how their teacher cares about them and respects their ideas. I think that by getting to know about your students’ interests and thoughts they really open up to you and feel more comfortable talking to you. As a teacher it is really important to set that tone in your classroom and this year, I believe I did an excellent job making my students feel comfortable and cared for in my classroom. Students were not afraid to ask me questions about the learning objectives. After school I was available daily to help students and I believe this showed the students that I cared about their understanding of the concepts. We also read an article in the class discussing the importance of failing. Students had to take the article home and talk to their parents about the ideas within the article. The article explained that by failing, you are given the opportunity to learn from the mistakes you made. I think that it’s important for student’s to understand that learning from our mistakes makes us stronger and that although you may fail something, you have the opportunity to see that as a learning opportunity.
Throughout my student teaching I learned how to assess students understanding daily, use engaging mathematical tasks and show students the importance of asking questions and learning from our mistakes. I believe that these three things will really benefit me when I get the opportunity to teach my own class next year.