questioning strategies

I know that one of my weaknesses as a teacher is that I tend to teach to the more able students in the class. Of course this is one of the greatest challenges that teachers face and no teacher is at all perfect at dealing with this problem. Yet especially during the first week of summer school I think I was guilty of progressing through a lesson while cultivating the understanding of only five or six of my students. Then one day I tried cold-calling by drawing random index cards with the kids’ names on it and ever since then I have made a conscious effort to call on a broader range of students.

Using cold-calling certainly makes it harder for certain students to fade into the background and not participate. I like to think that students will pay a little more attention if they know that they could be randomly called on. It also helps you gauge where the class is as a whole in their understanding of the material. Because I am now calling on more students who are struggling with the concepts, it gives me the chance to give them assistance and lead them to the answer. By doing this other students who are struggling with the same concept may get their questions answered.

Of course there are downsides to using cold-calling. Sometimes you will get a student who is utterly clueless and then you face the choice between taking time to address their confusion or to move on with the class. And other students, because of their embarrassment or nervousness about being called on or not knowing the answer, will attempt to derail the lesson by making a joke out of their response. As with most aspects of teaching, the solution is that one has to simply strike a balance.

2nd videotape

The icing on the cake of my awful week of team teaching was that my worst lesson of the week was caught on video. My overall performance for the week was, in my opinion, horrendous. I am not sure why, but my ability as a teacher decreased significantly when teaching in front of my peers as compared to the students at summer school. Tuesday’s lesson (the taped one) was a borderline painful experience. It was bad for a host of reasons that I won’t bother to discuss. So I anticipated that watching the actual video would be an even more painful it experience. Surprisingly it wasn’t. This leads me to two possible conclusions: either (1) the videotape didn’t catch all my inefficiencies as teacher, or (2) I am too hard on myself. I would be inclined to favor conclusion (2) because in general I have always been hard on myself, but this would contradict my experiences in summer school when I often thought I was doing “good” and others around me thought I was not doing “good enough.”

If I learned anything from the video and this week in general it is that nerves sometimes restrict my teaching ability. As I discussed with js at one point, it is ok to be nervous and sometimes nerves actually help you to perform better. I believe this to be true sometimes for me, but also my nerves sometimes get the better of me and act as a restricting force on my teaching.

videotape

On the last day of summer school, with the end-of-the-summer test awaiting the students the following period, I had to teach one last lesson on the Pythagorean Theorem. And it was recorded. After watching the video I am pleased to say that viewing myself teaching didn’t bother me all that much. Of course there is always some degree of awkwardness that goes along with seeing and hearing yourself on videotape. But overall I did a decent job with getting them slightly interesting in the material, presenting the material in different ways, and going over practice problems until most of the class ‘got it’. Of course there are plenty of things to work on. The idea of teacher-as-performer is perhaps something that I still haven’t grasped. I have a tough time really putting myself out there. I still don’t really feel comfortable talking for long periods of time in front of the class. I remember as a student sometimes the most interesting parts of class were when the teacher would narrate a story about their own lives or experiences that had some connection to the material. Hopefully over the course of the year I will develop this ability.

Inductive Strategies

During summer school in June I tried an inductive strategy during a lesson on the area of triangles and trapezoids. In the previous lesson the students had learned that the area of a parallelogram is a = bxh. I was hoping to get the students to build on this knowledge and to use the fact that every parallelogram can be cut into two equal triangles to discover that the equation for the area of a triangle is a = ½ bxh. So I devised what I thought was going to be a thrilling lecture in which I would demonstrate using construction paper cutouts how cutting a parallelogram in half gives you two triangles and then lead their captivated minds along to the epiphanic moment when they would derive proper formula. When I actually performed the lesson it didn’t quite go the way I planned. It the end it worked out and I had one student who did discover the equation for the area of a triangle based the information I was giving them, but overall I lost a lot of students along the way.

In general I love teaching lessons that involve inductive strategies. I believe when students learn the material inductively, especially in math, it gives them a whole new perspective that they would never had gained if it had been presented deductively. Of course time constraints necessitate the overwhelming use of deductive strategies, though I believe it is important to incorporate inductive learning whenever possible. If I learned anything for the lesson above it is that it is difficult to give an inductive lecture to a group of teenagers. Next time I think a more hands-on activity involving manipulatives would engage the students better.