Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Helping students with disabilities
I decided to read the article helping students with disabilities understand what mathematics means by Miller and Hudson. The article goes in depth about “five evidence based guidelines for implementing math instruction designed to promote conceptual understanding.” The article set up the guidelines in a very organized manner, which made it easy for me to understand and really relate what I was reading to my classroom. The first guideline is to “use various modes of representation” what this basically means is for instructions to present the material in different forms and formats for different various learning styles to be able to comprehend. The second guideline is “consider appropriate structures for teaching specific concepts.” This guideline explains that teachers should carefully plan and think critically about the way they structure their lessons. The structure of the lesson really has a large affect on how the information is presented and internalized by the students. It talked about how even though pictures, graphs, and diagrams are beneficial for the classroom, it’s also important that teachers know how to properly use these tools. Guideline three is “consider the language of mathematics.” In math I never really related it to language; however, they brought up excellent points about how important language is in math, and simply saying an equation wrong, or not explain methods in a clear way can cause such major long lasting problems for students. The fourth guideline is “integrate real-world application” this is one that I really liked and value. I think it’s very important to relate not only math, but all subject to real world situations. I remember sitting in high school and thinking to myself why am I learning this, what the point. I don’t even want my students to have those thoughts in my classroom. The last guideline is “provide explicit instruction.” This guideline “requires carefully designed lessons with clear and explicit teacher instruction.” This guideline “emphasizes teacher demonstrations, maximizing the students engagement and participation.” I think all these guidelines are beneficial and we as future teachers need to take these into consideration while we plan and teach our lessons. I see a lot of planning from my CT and believe she really does try to incorporate these guidelines into her teaching. What about you guys? Do you see your CT’s use any of these guidelines?
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Unfortunately I haven't seen my CT use these guidelines. I haven't seen her relate the math to their everyday lives. During measurements, I didn't like her examples for the students because she simply asked them to put thirteen cubes together, and different ways to do it. It wasn't meaningful whatsoever and I was even confused on what she was trying to demonstrate using these cubes... inches, centimeters, etc.... I feel the students understand what they are doing in class but they aren't making any connections to their lives. I bet she would have more attentive students if she were to connect it to even the inches on their feet, etc!
ReplyDeleteI as well have not seen my CT use these guidelines in teaching math. That is not to say however she does not use them at all, since I am only there a fraction of the time. I think all these guidelines are important, in particular guidelines one, three and four. I think it is very important for teachers to use various modes of representation, especially in math since no tow students learn in the exact same way. The more ways you can represent the same problem, the more students you are likely to have understand that problem. I think Rose made a great point of guideline three when she said, I did not think of the importance of mathematical language. Many people think language is not tied to math, but we use language to teach the math, so it is indeed evry important how we say different things. If something is said in a misleading way, students can be confused on that topic for years to come. Lastly, integrating real world examples into math is very important. In school, I too struggled with learning things because I thought there was no use in the real world for many of the mathematical concepts I was being taught. If teachers made this more explicit, I'm sure I would have caredmore and thus been more likely to learn the material for use later on in my life.
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