Chapter 4 Reflection (Content Literacy)

As a math teacher I have struggled to find an appropriate integration of our literacy strategies in my classroom. It’s not that I disagree that improving literacy is my responsibility-- not at all-- rather I struggle to fit literacy in when a) there is so little time and so much math to begin with and b) for many of my students my “in” is the little wedge of confidence that they have in the one class where low reading skills don’t immediately single them out--- well not as much that is.

Coming from this perspective I appreciated how widely applicable most of this chapter is. “The goal of literacy assessment” the authors write  is to encourage students to become “reflective, active, and purposeful learners.” This could just as well be the goal of any other type of assessment or educational strategy.

In taking this ‘goal’ literally I am slowly developing a niche for reading/writing in my classroom routines: namely, I am trying to make a habit of asking students to read out and write out steps and justifications of their thinking process and problem solving strategies. Not only is this just a general good practice, but I believe it has the dual benefit of 1) bolstering students with strong verbal skills and 2) challenging students who may already know what to do mathematically but not how to explain their own knowledge.

I was particularly interested by this chapters’ discussion of strategies to involve students in the assessment process. I love the idea of having students give input into the creation of rubrics. However I disagree that this type of engagement relieves teacher workload-- if anything it seems like facilitating this type of ‘mature’ student involvement would take a lot a lot of advance thought and planning. As a teacher I really struggle to draw out reflection or self-criticism on the part of my students.

A related struggle that stretches across discipline with implications for literacy is the challenge of getting students to use their own notes effectively. Of course in order for this to be possible their notes must be ‘usable’ i.e. ‘legible’ in the first place. However even those students who copy clearly must be explicitly taught how to look back and find answers to their own questions. It is a habit of self-reliance that sometimes seems impossible to build up in students with low confidence and low motivation... a crucial life skill that should be the goal of education in any discipline, but which in some ways seems more elusive that the most baffling phonics or factoring. 

Points of Comparison (Content Methods Reflection)

My green-book planner was great fun in the first months of school. “Function wheels” is scribbled in along a margin in mid-September between “Functions Test” and “start Unit -III.” There was, theoretically a 30min gap to fill. Needless to say, by the time that day rolled around between make-up work and management battles and piles of paperwork “function wheels” didn’t actually happen. 

Mock-teaching this activity the following saturday for our Content Methods Class then was bittersweet. I hate it that the few times I’ve tried creative activities have become management disasters; but I am also invigorated by the reminder that there are creative ways to represent material and engage students’ abstract thinking... something to aspire to.

Basically the activity was to build a manipulative that was the math-equivalent of a function table. We cut concentric circles of colored card stock and attached them in the center with a paper clip. We wrote input values around the outside circle and cut windows in the top disc so that the window would show the corresponding output as we rotate the outer circle.

In the ‘protected’ setting management was fine. Clear directions were super important. I’m glad that I had pre-copied the circles and also that I had students do the cutting instead of spending that time myself. In a larger class I probably would have a harder time walking around to check that people were folding and cutting correctly but that might be helped if I found a way to get students helping each other or have a visual of different stages of the assembly process.

Two strengths of the activity I think were that the “wheel” draws out the distinction between dependent and independent variable, and the “output windows” helped me to clarify f(x)-notation ( during my ‘traditional’ lesson this was a major point of confusion... the idea that f(x) isn’t itself an expression but rather the ‘name’ for an expression and which simultaneously represents an output). At the same time, I wonder about the pay-off of spending a whole 20 minutes on what really amounts to a single function table’s worth of calculations. Still, I could envision extending the activity to have partners composing their functions which I think would be powerful conceptually. I look forward to modifying the activity to try when I introduce functions in Transitional Algebra.