Don’t Mess with AAS

1. Don’t Mess with AAS Nicholas Hein EDS 379B 13 March 2014 Final Colloquium

2. Teaching Placement • Intern at Academy of Arts and Sciences Mission Valley • Former online school only. New blended program created Jan 1, 2014. • Traditional school schedule and program this year. Slow transition to blended program and college-like schedule effective April-May 2014. • Transition to tablets for every student in all their classes. • Large emphasis on recruiting instead of professional development. • The population is at about 75 students and demographics of the school are approximately 95% Hispanic and 5% African American • Teacher: • Teach 2 periods of Geometry and co-teach AVID • Co-head of the Math Department with fellow classmate, IsmaelSantacruz • Due to hardly any CSTs this year, the focus has switched from covering the CST topics to implementing Common Core • Classes: • Geometry classes have 9 and 14 students; AVID class has 7 students. • High Percentage of English Learners (28 of 31 students in my Geometry classes combined) ranging from early Expanding to Exit Bridging levels • 3 of the 13 students in my 4th period Geometry class and 5 of the 18 students in my 5th period Geometry class have an IEP plan • 0 students scored Proficient or Advanced on last year’s CST scores

3. Making Subject Matter Comprehensible to Students • TPE 1B: Subject-specific pedagogical skills for Single Subject Teaching Assignments • Model and encourage students to use multiple ways of approaching mathematical problems, and they encourage discussion of different solution strategies. • In the unit on Trigonometry, I taught students that they can find the angle of a right triangle in multiple ways: using a trig table or using the inverse trig functions on a calculator. On the quiz question seen above, I let students decide which strategy they wanted to use and reminded them verbally that they can use either strategy and recommend they use both to check if they get the same answer.

4. Assessing Student Learning • TPE 2: Monitoring Student Learning During Instruction • Anticipate, check for, and address common student misconceptions and misunderstandings. • This is a picture of the questions and misconceptions I think about and use in my daily lessons. In my daily lesson plan notes, I plan for areas that might confuse students based on previous work or any difficulties that I can predict. I include scaffolded questions I can ask to check for understanding and guide the students in case there is a misunderstanding.

5. Assessing Student Learning • TPE 3: Interpretation and Use of Assessments • Teach students how to use self-assessment strategies and provide guidance and time for students to practice these strategies. • On the classwork, I have students reflect on the notes and example problems to help them self-assess their understanding. After students do this reflection, it helps them pinpoint where in the classwork they might difficulty and the area they need to practice and improve. It also helps me have an idea of where they are having difficulty so I can give guidance on that specific area as opposed to the whole problem.

6. Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for Students • TPE 8: Learning About the Students • Through interpersonal interactions, they learn about students’ abilities, ideas, interests and aspirations. • This picture above is a visual representation I used to show similarity. After talking with a few students about what they like to do outside of school, I knew there were two students really into cars and thought that this representation of a car and its hot-wheel replica grabbed their attention and helped illustrate the conceptual idea of similarity.

7. Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for Students • TPE 9: Instructional Planning • Plan how to explain content clearly and make abstract concepts concrete and meaningful. • The pictures seen to the right shows how I made trigonometry more accessible and easy to understand with the acronyms of SOH-CAH-TOA and helped make the abstract less abstract and meaningful by doing a group project using trigonometry in real life to find the height of objects at an inaccessible height.

8. Final Steps • One of the things I want to work on is making math more meaningful (TPE 9) by showing and having the students do more real-life applications of math. The applied project on trigonometry worked very well in sparking their interest and having them take an active role in the math around them, and I want to work on creating or finding an applied project to sum up or introduce more units of math. • Another aspect of my teaching I want to work on is differentiating the process and content. I want to improve on providing diverse opportunities such as the “Three-in-a-row activity” for students at different levels to show proficiency of the material. I also am trying to improve on providing varied levels of the content for students at different levels of understanding to be challenged by just enough without being too overwhelmed. • One more area of my teaching I strive for improvement is the way I analyze assessments. Before, I would grade assessments and get general themes from the class on specific problems or misunderstandings, but I want to improve on grouping the student’s assessments and looking for patterns among the subgroups of assessments.