Thursday, December 7, 2023

Final Reflection

Looking through my blogs, I noticed some key themes. I see that we focused on different ways of structuring our classroom and facilitating student inquiry. I think the content we explored looked at Inquiry in two ways. First of all, we looked at it from a teacher perspective - how can we think outside of the grid on our teaching. How can we incorporate social justice, art or embodied practice into Math education that has traditionally not incorporated those things. We also took on the student perspective by reflecting on our own experiences of learning and by trying out new things and reflecting on what that experience was like.

One blog that stood out to me was the one on competition. This was a very eye-opening topic for me as I had not considered the harm of having competition so central to our teaching environments. I ended up doing my project for another class on how traditional grading practices are a competitive and colonial system. I think being curious about students' experience is so key.

A main part of this course was the project which I also learned from. I enjoyed looking into mindfulness practices and collaborating with Esther.

I cannot think of anything I would change about this course - maybe looking at even more different teaching styles could be interesting.

I think a key takeaway is that good teaching means continuing to be curious because students will continue to change and I want my teaching to be relevant and interesting.

Inquiry Project Reflection

 Our project finalized differently than I thought it would at the beginning. It was interesting to see how my original idea changed when I started working with Esther and combining our ideas and then changed again when we started doing the research. I am happy that our project includes a lot of practical ideas for how to use the research in the classroom. I was surprised to see in the research that there isn't a lot of evidence for anxiety-reducing strategies being effective. Mindfulness practices was one of the only strategies we found that had multiple studies showing improvement for students. I think it is an important topic because math anxiety is so common. I think our presentation went well and people generally seemed keen to participate in our activity which hopefully means they will be interested in implementing some of these strategies in their classes. I am curious how we can continue this project further in Inquiry 2. I wonder if we could talk to more teachers who have used mindfulness practice to gauge what things worked well and what didn't. 

This is something I am very passionate about because I think students will remember how they feel in our classes more than they will remember what they did or what content they learned. Students should not be experiencing extreme levels of stress in a learning environment. I hope to continue exploration into this topic so I can implement these strategies effectively when I have my own class!