EDBE 8F83: Blog

Differentiated Instruction      In this week’s lesson, we looked at differentiated instruction in mathematics.  Given that students differ in many ways, teachers need to plan their lessons to cater to all learning styles.  I find that in mathematics education, teachers are less likely to vary the materials students work with because they are these different teaching tools.  When I hear differentiated instruction, I think of creating a unique instructional activity/ path for each student.  Understandably, this is an unrealistic alternative to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ method of teaching, so teachers need to develop manageable strategies into their teaching in order to cater to most of their students at once.  During our lesson, we were given examples of questions that were open to interpretation.  I think these types of open questions would be useful for differentiation in mathematics because it allows stude...

Manipulatives! Manipulatives are very useful tools that have been used in mathematics since ancient times.   For example, ancient Romans used/ created the abacus to help them count, however they were not seen yet as educational tools.   Today, there are a variety of manipulatives that could be incorporated into countless different mathematical activities.   In today’s lesson, we had the opportunity to use a couple different manipulative tools and try to understand how they could be used in a lesson to help students grasp concepts.   I found this task to be rather challenging because I am used to problem solving mathematics by using a paper and pencil, rather than using and manipulating objects.   During this activity, I realized that the majority of the students I will be teaching have not yet developed the ability to use abstract thinking to solve problems, but rather need build their way to abstract thinking gradually.   For this reason, I believe ...