Final Reflection for MIAA 350 (Mathematical Instruction) What type of cognitive strategies and tasks can I incorporate into my lesson design that will allow my students to demonstrate an understanding of concepts, skills, and theories in the field of mathematics?
I was able to learn a number of cognitive strategies and tasks from this mathematical instruction course. Through note taking and demonstration, there were a number of new knowledge, theories, concepts and tasks I was able to understand and later demonstrate in my practice. In this course, we went over a variety of content that is essential for instruction; The content information includes the following: Numbers and numeration, integers, fractions, Addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, number theory, algebra, and units of measurement. With these units, a few cognitive strategies and tasks stood out for me. One simple, yet high effective, strategy has students using manipulatives. Having students attempting to solve problems using blocks or tiles is a great strategy; students can solve problems and create formulas without the teacher having to be as specific as possible. Manipulatives allows for students to discover on their own, which allow for freedom to solve a problem. This allows for higher retention of concepts and ideas that are learned in class. I was able to discover cognitive strategies and tasks through scholarly reading. During this course, I was able to read a scholarly article titled, A Skyscraping Feat by Sarah A. Roberts and Jean S. Lee. In this article, the authors state that learning is maximized when there is sustained use of high cognitive demanding tasks through instruction. Roberts and Lee claim that in order to maximize student learning, teachers need to prepare to facilitate student learning, not simply giving challenging problems (Roberts and Lee, 258 & 260, 2013). The authors use the problem of determining how many skyscraping windows one would need to clean and the cost associated with it. The beauty of this problem is that the facilitator does not tell students how to solve it, rather allow them to solve it themselves. Roberts and Lee show how there are at least 6 different ways of solving this problem (and they demonstrate it in the article). The authors also give good strategies on how to successfully facilitate complete, high-cognitive tasks; some strategies include aligning them to standards/objectives, being prepared for possible questions asked by students (which can help for differentiation and checking in), allowing students individual time before group collaboration, and concluding with an entire class debrief (Roberts and Lee, 260, 2013). I felt this article was very well written, clear and concise. What I liked about this article is that the authors provided specific prompts that a teacher can pose to its students for each strategy. Each pathway had between 3 to 5 prompts that a teacher could ask. Another major component on this mathematical instruction class is that we were required to reflect on four different occasions. We needed to reflect on the instruction that we do on our own math classes or those of our colleagues. Although I do not teach mathematics, I was able to use one of my reflections on a history lesson in which I utilized statistics and data. The other reflections were based on observations and interviews with teachers from the three grade spans. My goal for these observations (and interviews) was to determine what cognitive strategies and tasks were teachers using in their classes to promote higher learning. One common pattern was that I felt like I was able to apply some of the information that I learned from the class into the lessons that I was observing. For example, one teacher was going to teach her class how to complete the square in algebra. She was explaining what that was and what she was having her students solve (when given only x 2 + bx). Students need to solve for the perfect square trinomial. As she was showing me how she solves it though algebra, I thought how one can use algebraic manipulatives to help solve the issue. She told me that she has used manipulatives in the past and does plan on using in her class this year. I think that as professionals, If we can increase our observing and collaboration of each other, we can learn so much more from one another.