MAET Lesson Plan
MAET Reflection Blog
Reflecting on my first year as a 4th grade teacher, the area that caused me the most stress was, without a doubt, math. I thought about my learning as a student 17 years ago and I knew that math was taught in a very different way in 2001 than it is in 2018. This “unknown” made me critical of of my lessons and eager to improve as an educator. I chose this lesson specifically because probability was an area that was quite difficult for my students. After analyzing my instruction and deciding on “reinvention” of this unit, I took the MAET lesson plan as a chance to incorporate what I know about TPACK (Technology, pedagogy and content knowledge) and student learning to create a more integrated and meaningful lesson.
This lesson is the 3rd in a series of 5 about probability. Prior to this lesson, the students have discussed important vocabulary and practiced matching fractions and decimals with various scenarios. After discovering “Book Creator,” I immediately thought about how useful this tool would be in fostering students creativity. One of the new Virginia standards this year is to “create a practical problem to represent a given probability.” I knew when I began planning this lesson, that I wanted students to be collaborative and reflective of their learning. Book Creator allows students to work together and create visual representations to illustrate their thinking. Furthermore, it combines literacy with math as students create a short “math story,” with their word problem, answer and reflective connections.
At the beginning of the semester we discussed how people learn and the importance of “chunking” (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Chunking is the subconscious/conscious act of grouping known information together (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). By having the students use Book Creator to create their word problem, they have to think about their problem in a dynamic way, including the pictures/ shapes to include, the distribution of tasks within a group and the cross curricular connections. By encouraging children to have that metacognitive awareness, it will allow them to create those meaningful connections and hopefully encourage easy accessibility in the future (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). .
As I was creating this lesson, I thought a lot about the three elements of TPACK and how important they are to a successful lesson. When I first found Book Creator, I knew that it was a great resource, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just using this technology just to use it. Word problems are a difficult element of math, and my goal was to use it in a way that would align with the pedagogy I knew was effective. This is why I decided to use Book Creator in my stations (small groups). I knew that my students needed more individualized attention and I wanted to ensure that they had the differentiation that they needed to understand the basic content knowledge. By using this website in my small group, I could easily see who needed more explicit instruction and practice and who was ready for the higher level, creation piece.
References: Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school: Expanded edition. Washington D.C.: National Academies Press.