Teaching Portfolio
Number Talks
Given the limited amount of time we had in our math block, my mentor teacher and I began breaking our lessons down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Lessons often began with a quick review of the objective from the day prior, combined with one to two warm up problems. This recap included and/or lead directly into a whole group number talk. A number talk typically starts with a brief discussion of key vocabulary and relates a new math concept back to something students already know and feel comfortable with. Our number talks focused on reviewing critical pre-skills that students would need to know and feel comfortable with to fully engage in the lesson for that day. For example, when students learned the formula for finding the area of a right triangle, the number talk reviewed the fraction ½, and had students practice halving numbers.
Early on in the quarter, number talks required students to solve using mental math, but as we moved into geometry, students would solve these problems on their boards to show their thinking. Furthermore, students are asked to explain how they got their answers using oral explanations. This is a quick and easy way to monitor student understanding, boost confidence early on in the lesson, and further reinforce learning by having students talk through their work.
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Our number talks also involved students using hand signals and the chat feature. It is important for students to have a way to communicate their thoughts with the teacher without distracting others who are still thinking. Thus, number talks reinforced the importance of nonverbals and student engagement, which are especially important components in a virtual setting. I continually encourage the use of hand signals and screen reactions as they are effective ways for students to remain engaged throughout the lesson, even if they are not the one who is sharing out.
Digital Math Journal
In addition to nailing down new math concepts, students were expected to learn a lot of new math vocabulary this quarter. Learning to teach math effectively and efficiently in a virtual setting was a bit challenging, especially because we only had 50 minutes of instruction!Â
To stay on track, we had to move at a quick pace, which often left us with little time to practice and review concepts during class. My mentor teacher and I noticed that some of our students would confuse words and definitions (e.g., Factor and Multiple) and had trouble keeping track of past concepts which newer material was founded on. To help students who needed more time to master skills and review what we had learned in class, our team decided it would be helpful to create a digital math journal using our weekly lessons. Students saved this page as a bookmark so they could quickly reference it when completing work on their own. Furthermore, all of our math content stayed organized and could be found in one place whenever students, or their parents, wanted to refer back to what we were learning. The link to this journal was included in our daily seesaw assignments which provided students with steps to solve problems, as well as several example problems similar to the questions given for homework. In creating this journal, I provided my students with the tools and resources to review both new and old concepts they struggled with.
Breakout Rooms
DIFFERENTIATION & PERSONLIZED LEARNING
In our afternoon group of students, we used breakout rooms to differentiate math instruction and effectively deliver personalized learning experiences to students with varying skills and learning styles. Due to the limitations of a virtual teaching environment, there are many things that we cannot do right now with our students, however, breakout rooms are extremely effective in providing us with the opportunity to meet with students who need extra support. Using breakout rooms, we split our math class into three, (sometimes four) groups of students, depending upon whether we have the math specialist and Special Education teacher attend our meeting. This provided me with the opportunity to review assessment data and work one-to-one with individual students while the rest of the class worked asynchronously on ST. Math or a SeeSaw assignment.