Methods of Math Teaching and Learning

         Welcome back once again to the Tea on the Hill! I must admit this Tea has been delicious lately. I brought some lemon to put on our cup as we sat back in the shade and enjoyed this ice-cold Arnold Palmer. While we gossip more about The Hill because we are doing Place Values this week. Once again, we have two students presenting again, and this time you're going to be a little shocked when I tell you who presented. Ms. Arianna Fletcher, Miss Alabama Agriculture & Mechanical University is an elementary education major, Pre-service Teacher, and a Senior here on campus. I know that Tea was good and cold going down because you weren't expecting that. I know you weren't. It’s okay; she presented today on place values which was her first time presenting. The problem she presented to the class today was 360 + 275, which is 635. She asked who would like to defend the answer, but before she asked, another student said, “ my answer is 615” then the student came back and

More Tea on the Hill!!! Doubles/ Near Double   Welcome back to more Tea on the Hill!! As you all know, we have been working on Number Talks for a while now, but it gets better every week. This week we are working on Doubles/ Near- Doubles. You probably wonder what it is while you sip the Arnold Palmer. Take a good sip while I tell you how these Number Talks were mastered by two Pre-Service Teachers, not just one. We have Ms. Davonna a senior here at A&M, and Ms. Cassidy, a Junior here also at A&M. Ms. Davonna sounded a little nervous, but she mastered her part in getting the class to give her the answer to the problem. And, of course, you know we always start off with our fists to the chest because we are ready to start! The problem that was given was 998 + 999, which is 1,997. During this session, everyone agreed, and two ways to get the answer were defined. One of the ways is rounding 998 and 999 and subtracting two from one side and 1 from the other to get the answer. Anothe

  Welcome back to the Tea on the Hill!  I’m pretty sure you have been waiting on this post. So let’s start this week's tea. We have a brand new preservice teacher, Ms. Cassidy who is also a member of SGA. This is also her first time teaching Number Talks to other seniors and juniors' preservice teachers. She followed the rules for Number Talk, in which students had to put their fists to their chests because they were ready to start. The image was shown for 3 to 5 seconds to determine how many dots they saw. After the image is displayed, students were asked, “How many did you see?”, “How do you see it?”. Now this time, we didn't have a challenge going on to defend the answer. Everyone agreed on “12,” but we did have a lot of students respond to the many ways how they saw “12”. Students responded with two different answers: Multiplication and Addition. Now don’t go too far because the tea is getting good. Come back next week because we are mixing some lemonade with this tea a

  Let’s Spill the Tea about The Hill:   So how about our very own senior preservice teacher, Taugene Morris, taught NumberTalks? And not just Number Talks. But  Number Talks with ten frames using dots. This was her very first time teaching it to other senior and junior preservice teachers. She challenged the students to view the slide for 3 to 5 seconds to determine how many dots they saw. After the seconds, she asked questions  such, “How many did you see?”, “How you saw it ?”. One Student responded “12,” and other students said “15”. Students then had to defend whether to pick twelve or fifteen. They decided to go with fifteen, and the question was asked, “how did you see it?” Students responded with three different answers: multiplication, addition, and division. Now that was some excellent tea on The Hill. Come back next week for more  Tea on the Hill. McVay, S., & Massey, J.( 2022). Let's spill the teach about the hill.

  August 29, 2022                                    Number Talks: New Year! New Crew! This is my favorite time of the school year! Math Methods! A new group of teacher candidates to influence to become excellent mathematics teachers. A new group of students to discuss evidence-based math practices. Today we discussed several concepts such as different math representations. For example, PSTs were challenged to represent 3/5 visually, symbolically, physically, and contextually. A couple of my teacher candidates used a number line to represent 3/5. I was impressed. Of course, we engaged in a Number Talks session at the end of the lesson.  To recap, Number Talks (NT) is a teaching and learning method that helps to develop efficient, flexible, and accurate computation strategies. The strategies build upon the key foundational idea of mathematics (Parrish, S. 2014). According to Parrish(2014), the key components of NT are classroom environment and community, classroom discussion, teachers&#

  The following problem is a type of problem my preservice teachers encounter on the Praxis II Multiple Mathematics assessment:  If the price of a computer, including a 9% tax, is $3,545.00, what is the cost of the computer before the tax is added? Traditionally, students are asked to find the cost of an item after adding tax to the original cost. Moreover, students are asked to find the total cost of an item after applying some sort of discount. The above problem is like a reverse operation or is it.  Let's review how to compute sale tax and the cost of something after adding the sale tax. Let's say a computer costs $1575 without the tax included. There is an 8% tax to add to the cost of the computer. $1575 X .08= $126. Then, add the $126 to the cost of the $1575 + $126=$1701. The computer will cost $1701. This does not include the warranty or service plan.  The math is straightforward computation, and the situation is real world. What Praxis wants to know is if you can calcul

  Jamming on the Jamboard: Using Jamboard as a Tool for Recognizing Differences in Teacher Education   Every semester I involved my elementary education preservice teacher in discussion on topics concerning demographics in education. Usually, I ask my students to chart their elementary teacher demographics, and we usually do this mentally. Of course, we discover that we have far more female than male teachers and white than other races as elementary school teachers. Then we read public data that confirms our lived experience with elementary school teachers. However, this year I did something different. We used a visual tool to chart our teaching demographics. I utilized Google’s Jamboard to create a visual representation of our elementary school teacher demographics. The picture at the bottom of this blog post is a display of our data. We disaggregated our elementary teachers by gender and race. From the visual representation, PST were able to quickly determine that our element