Observing and Learning

I think it's important to take the time to go and observe other teachers teaching styles and methods of instruction. This helps us grow as educators and opens us up to different ideas, which is really important. This past week I observed the geometry teacher at my school and was able to see how her approach to the classroom was different. She started the class off by writing the "I can.." statement on the board for the lesson of the day. This is very similar to what I do in my classroom but in my classroom I have the students create the "I can..." statement. After this she went through the lesson using google docs that the students had created the day before. The students had gone home and found proofs of a geometric property they were working on as a class. These proofs were found online and were suppose to be proofs that made the most sense to the students. Once the students posted the proofs to a google doc and shared it with the class they came in the next day to present the proof they found to the class and walk through the proof together. This was interesting to me because the students lead the class in a way. They were able to find something online that helped them make more sense of the topic at hand and then present this to the class. This is really helpful for the class to see what helps other students understand a concept in hopes that this might help them understand it better as well. The remainder of the class was the discussion of the proofs and tying this back to the topic for the day.

After observing this course and how it was run I had the teacher tell me about her thoughts of what teaching is, what our roles are as educators, and her view of the students. This was really interesting when looking back on the way the classroom was run. She viewed her role in the classroom as more of a 'coach' which was clearly visible in how we saw her 'give' control over to the students and allowed them to explore the concepts she presented in their own way but coached them through the process, clarifying any misconceptions. She said she see's that each student comes into the classroom with a different amount of talent and it's her job to form a classroom where each students' talent. She also said she viewed mathematics as like doing an experiment. This is evident in her classroom structure as well when we look at how she has each student explore a different means of proving one concept. She allows student to find other's "experiments" and discover if this type of experimenting makes sense to them and learn why this works for them as well.

This whole experience was eye opening to me because I had never thought to run my classroom through google docs and student presentations of found proofs. I think this is something that only works with very small class sizes (this class only had 4 students) and advanced students who are able to be held accountable for this proof search and presentation. Having students explore others' proofs would be something I might like to implement in my own classroom.