EDBE 8F83: Blog

Grade 11 lesson activities & Teacher Efficacy Lesson activities: Teaching grade 11 concepts in creative ways to help improve student understanding is very difficult.   I think that Corin presented a great way of helping students visualize a complex trigonometric word problem.   I think that many students have troubles visualizing problems, and for this reason they tend to do poorly on trigonometric word problems.   By doing the demonstration presented by Corin, it would help students feel more comfortable to use objects at their own desk when working through word problems in order to better visualize the problem.   Another part of Corins lesson, I look forward to implementing in my future classes was having students split 3-D objects into 2-D shapes in order to solve the problems.   I think this could really help students understand the steps needed to solve 3-D questions, and diminish math anxiety.   Trigonometric identities are usually ...

I found Carly’s presentation on her lesson of the Pythagorean Theorem both creative and interesting.   In particular, I really enjoyed the doodle worksheet she created because it allowed for note taking to be fun and engaging.   Instead of students mindlessly copying down notes, this sheet allows for students to have more time to process the concepts as well as individualize their notes through doodling.   I also think that getting students to colour in the triangles using different colours would allow student to better visualize how the sum of the two legs of a right triangle equal the sum of the hypotenuse.   I think that by incorporating doodling into the lesson/ worksheet, students would be less stressed and more willing to focus.   For example, I know when I am listening to a lesson, I find I can focus more when I am doodling on my paper.   I also think that by having more diagrams and simple steps on the sheet and for the lesson was a great idea beca...

During my first block teaching, I taught two grade 11 physics courses, one of which was enhanced with 15 students, and the other had 24 students.   Although I was teaching the same lessons in both classes, I found that the class dynamics were extremely different.   I found that my first week teaching the enhanced class was challenging because the students did not regard me as having expert knowledge in the subject.   However, once I began getting to know the students and asking them questions unrelated to the lessons being taught, they began to warm up to me.   For example, during the lesson I would take breaks to ask individual students about events they were part of.   I.e. a couple students had a math contest, so I discussed that with them.   During my placement, I found out that many of the enhanced students were in the schools band, so I purchased a ticket to see them preform at music night.   The next day during my lesson, I mentioned how good...