I have learned a lot about literacy this semester, especially about how many different ways there are to be literate and how important it is to directly instruct students in the skills necessary to become literate. I am excited to integrate the things I have learned in my classroom as a teacher.
I plan on teaching my students how to correctly read graphs and spot misleading data in mathematical representations. This is how I am going to integrate critical literacy. I plan on explicitly teaching the language of math and what it means to my students. I also plan on teaching my students how to decode math problems to bits and pieces that they understand. This is how I plan on teaching comprehension and vocabulary to my students.
I am excited to integrate what I have learned from this class in regards to writing instruction. I have recently been learning through my classes with Jim Cangelosi, that writing is SO IMPORTANT in mathematics education. I knew it was important, but I was a little bit fuzzy on how to implement it. This was probably my favorite part of the course because now I have some very good ideas on how to get my students to write and make mathematical representations of their ideas.
This has been a great semester and I am glad I took it my last semester. It will be very nice to have this information fresh on my mind when I go into my student teaching and I hope I will be able to effectively implement the things I learned. I may not be able to implement them all, but I want to keep some of them and really practice them.
I am so glad that you plan to integrate writing instruction into math. I personally am a very big fan of writing, but I think that I would have a hard time finding ways to integrate it into math. I guess that is why you are the math teacher. Writing is so important no matter the subject because even though we live in a technological world, we still write all the time. Sometimes we just write in different ways.
ReplyDeleteBefore this course I would have called you crazy for trying to implement writing into math. I mean algebra already has too many letters in it. After taking SecEd 4200 I have learned how writing is actually a very intricate part of math as well as agriculture. In fact math is a critical part of agriculture as well and because of that students need to be able to think critically about the numbers they read while making decisions in agriculture. I'm glad you want to focus on teaching your students to spot misleading data in mathematical representations because misleading data is one reason agricultural enterprises fail.
ReplyDeleteI love your idea for having students identify misleading information! I'll have to add that to my lessons too because misleading scientific data shows up in science A LOT!
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