Methods of Math Teaching and Learning

  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 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...

  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 ou...

  Math Campus Trail II: The Quad Continuing the math campus trail for one more week was necessary. AAMU has many things to offer mathematically, and PST needed another example to reference for their assignment. Preservice teachers (PST) were presented this time with the task of seeing relevance in mathematics with the Quad. The Quad was chosen because AAMU used this area to have weekly activities such as Every Sunny Wednesday. There are diverse activities during Every Sunny Wednesdays based on student services decisions. However, for this math campus trail, Every Sunny Wednesday is not the focus of this activity. The focus for this activity will be the Quad itself. Figure 1 is a picture of the Quad on campus. This is the picture I presented to PST. Figure 2 is a picture of PST responses to finding math representations on the Quad. Figure 1 Picture of the Quad at AAMU Figure 2 PST Math Findings on Quad Findings: The mathematics domain that PST came up with includes the followi...

  Campus Math Trail! Finding the Math Across Campus   Mathematics is everywhere! It’s in the places we go and the things we do. We should seek mathematics in our everyday lives, as in reading. Mathematic understanding is just not the select few people with what we call the math gene. Looking for the relevancy in mathematics should encompass our daily lives as we seek to make meaning with mathematics. One of my goals as a mathematics teacher educator is to pull out the real-life instances for using mathematics daily at the early childhood and elementary levels. For my preservice teachers (PST), this could be an awesome challenge especially when they may feel the connections are real connections.   For this reason and because it is Homecoming on campus, I challenged them to look across campus to determine how mathematics is used across the domains. The domains include numbers and operation-base ten, numbers and operations-fractions, counting and cardinality, geometry,...