Reflection and a new action plan!

I’ll start by stating that I am certainly not a person that writes a lot – I guess that is why I became a math teacher. I find that I reflect internally, rather than by writing stuff down or talking about it, although I certainly see the benefits of both. That being said, I will try almost anything once, so here it goes!

I found the first Face to Face to be exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. I was excited to see where this journey would take me and my teaching career, and nervous about the responsibility to a year-long commitment.  I found the first F2F to be exhausting, but necessary in breaking the ice and having everyone feel comfortable with each other and the various tools and processes involved in Cohort 21. I am lucky enough to have had some experience with design thinking and action plans through my schools internal PD group (affectionately referred to as the “Learning League”), and have been using twitter consistently for the past couple of years, so I felt comfortable with the onboarding process both before and during the first F2F. It was nice to get to know other teachers who are interested in improving their teaching and exploring new innovative practices. I am looking forward to continuing to expand my PLN and to grow as a teacher!

I have decided that I want to look at engagement in the math classroom. I think engagement is vital to students learning, as it will impact their motivation and therefore behaviour in the classroom. In order to understand more of what the students find engaging and interesting, I created a Google Form to survey students both in my classes and in other math courses and grades. Some of the feedback was expected, but I was surprised by some of the responses. 

I expected the students to find classes that were relevant to real life, related to financial applications and involving games to be the most engaging, and this was certainly the case in the survey. I was surprised by the prevalence of students who wanted more group work and found collaboration to be a key to engagement. Feel free to check out the results here.

This process confirmed that classroom engagement is an area that I would like to focus on, and helped to expand my scope of focus to include increasing collaboration in the math classroom. I am looking forward to the 2nd F2F this weekend, and to developing an action plan to tackle this area!