Teaching
Standards Addressed
INTASC Standard 1 - Discipline Knowledge and Understanding
INTASC Standard 2 - Understanding Student Development
INTASC Standard 2 - Understanding Student Development
Artifact 1 - PreCalc Human Graphs Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is one that I wrote for the Junior PreCalculus class that I taught during student teaching. This lesson plan involves students creating graphs by walking on a coordinate axis taped to the floor. The point of this lesson is to help students see transformations (such as translations, reflections, and dilations) of parent functions. The unit that this was taught in involved looking at a number of different parent functions (absolute value, cubic, quadratic, square root) and applying transformations. This concept can be hard for students to understand unless they have a visual representation of the transformation. This lesson gives students a chance to get out of their seats and explore the mathematics through movement and visualizations.
Artifact 2 - Student Work (Video Game Project)
This artifact is a sample of student work from a project we did in Algebra this semester. The concept that we were studying for the project was solving linear equations. For this project, students were presented with the task of researching different video game systems for a retirement home looking to buy some video game systems for their residents. Students were given a budget of $1000 and asked to come up with a presentation where they were to find pros and cons of each system and ultimately give an overall recommendation for which system would be the best to buy. Students did research into each system and then worked to solve equations to find out how many of each system they could buy with their budget. Students really got into this project because of its real-life application and the authentic audience that they were presenting to. Below are a couple samples of student work from the project: one is the mathematics document that the students had to turn in and the other is a sample presentation from one of the groups.
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Reflection
INTASC Standard 1 deals with Discipline Knowledge and Understanding which requires the teacher to demonstrate knowledge of the content and pedagogy. The lesson plan presented as the first artifact requires that the teacher give the students some guidance so that they create the correct graphs so they can make generalizations about the transformations that parent functions undergo. In order to facilitate this, the teacher must know the content well enough to teach it. The lesson demonstrates that I, as the teacher, must have a firm understanding of the content so I can teach it to my students correctly. The activity is also one that students remembered and referenced multiple times over the course of the semester. This artifact demonstrates how I created a learning experience that made learning meaningful to students. The second artifact demonstrates that I can create a learning experience for students that is meaningful to students. The students took ownership of their work by creating informational presentations and documents using the content they learned in the series of coherent and connected lessons they were taught over the course of the unit.
INTASC Standard 2 deals with Understanding Student Development which requires the teacher to understand how students learn and develop and to help students in setting and reaching goals. The lesson plan used for Artifact 1 shows that I have selected a type of learning where students will learn and develop while they progress through the lesson. The activity was exciting for students and got them excited about learning the content. This type of hands-on learning gave students a meaningful experience in the classroom and ultimately helped them learn the material more effectively. The second artifact shows that I have created a learning experience for students that is exciting and beneficial to them. The students really got involved in the project because it was something that interested them and they were sharing their hard work with an authentic audience. I helped students stay on track and set goals for themselves so that they could complete the project on time and give their audience what it was they wanted.
INTASC Standard 2 deals with Understanding Student Development which requires the teacher to understand how students learn and develop and to help students in setting and reaching goals. The lesson plan used for Artifact 1 shows that I have selected a type of learning where students will learn and develop while they progress through the lesson. The activity was exciting for students and got them excited about learning the content. This type of hands-on learning gave students a meaningful experience in the classroom and ultimately helped them learn the material more effectively. The second artifact shows that I have created a learning experience for students that is exciting and beneficial to them. The students really got involved in the project because it was something that interested them and they were sharing their hard work with an authentic audience. I helped students stay on track and set goals for themselves so that they could complete the project on time and give their audience what it was they wanted.