Instructional Performance

My first lesson plans were aimed at reviewing math class basics. By basics, I am referring to rules and procedures, and very introductory skills: order of operations, reducing fractions, solving word problems, etc. I did not assume that it was the first time my students were seeing any of this information - in fact, I assume that they have gone through many of this many times. My goal while writing many of these lesson plans, therefore, was both to present the information to them in a familiar way, as well as to make it something new and memorable. My reason for wanting to make it familiar was in order to move quickly through it, and into the more difficult grade level benchmarks. However, I also wanted to make the information new and (hopefully) more memorable, because I feel that so much of middle school math – most math probably – is built on top of these concepts, and that to hold a firm grasp on these things helps tremendously in learning higher conceptual math skills.

It was difficult to condense both familiarity and newness into a single lesson. I did this by beginning with a familiar concept, using familiar vocabulary, and showing the more familiar steps, concepts, etc. As we worked through these terms and steps, I tried to incorporate an activity that the students would not have used before to serve as a form of inductive learning, as well as to create a memorable experience that the students might take with them, even if only for a little while. An example of this can be seen in my parallel and transverse lines lesson plan: I began by going through basic vocabulary with my students and asking them to point out a vertex, define a parallel line, show me what it means to intersect, etc. After working through and giving examples of each of the vocabulary terms, the students and I went out into the hallway, armed with masking tape, a marker, and some pieces of construction paper having angle degrees on them. I instructed the students to use the tape to make a pair of parallel lines and a transversal line. They worked together, without any help, and did a beautiful job. They labeled the lines they made with the marker. Next, I posted up the pieces of construction paper at the 8 different angles made by the transverse and the parallels. Six of the angles had a given angle measure, two did not. I asked them to use their understanding of the definitions of complementary and supplementary that we had discussed in class to find the missing angles. It was awesome. I was shocked at how quickly they reasoned it out. Class ended after they filled in their missing angles and posted them up on the wall, but this activity is a great ending for a lesson on parallels, and a great intro into discovering the relationships that different angles have to each other. Without even asking, I had a young girl in my class tell me that she noticed a lot of the angles were equal to each other in similar ways. I can’t wait for her to realize that this self-made discovery is an essential geometrical benchmark that she figured out all on her own.