LAST Reflection: Letter to the Newbies

The summer ARC teacher candidates met Thursday, April 22 for orientation. Their journey is beginning. What two or three pieces of advice would you share with them? You can address any or all of the following: core, methods, student teaching.

I will copy and paste your suggestions to a document to share with them - anonymity will be honored.

LAST Reflection: ARC Suggestion

The primary purpose of ARC is to prepare teacher candidates to be effective teachers. Choose the one area in methods you believe we can improve to help better prepare teacher candidates. Disregard any logistical constraints you think would hinder you idea. (You will have an opportunity to provide anonymous, official feedback as well.)

Please address the following:

• Explain the area and why you select it as needing improvement.
• Offer a suggestion if you have any.

Follow up on April 24

Here's the CCT document - the foundation for TEAM (link to CTTEAM website), your new teacher training information.

Reflection Assignment Week of April 12: Parent Phone Call

Summarize and analyze a parent phone call you've made. If you haven't made a call yet, make one during the next couple days you teach.

• What was the purpose of the call?
• How did you get the number?
• How did you introduce yourself?
• With whom did you speak, mother? Uncle?
• How did it go?
• What results, if any, did you witness?

Reflection Assignment Week of April 12: Effective Lesson

Give very concise summary of an effective lesson you taught:

• objective
• key activities
• assessment

Analyze the lesson:

• What stood out that made it effective?
• What suprised you?
• What went as planned or even better than planned?
• What previous experience prepared you to be effective?

Reflection Assignment Week of April 5: Classroom management

Evaluate your classroom management. What is working and what is not working? What have you learned? Summarize and analyze.

Reflection Assignment Week of April 5th: Impacting Young People

Bill shared a great story about getting through to a student with challenging behaviors. What positive experience have you had with a student, students, or class? Share a narrative and analysis. How did it make you feel?

Example of Scaffolding as an alternative presentation

Here is an example I cited in a response to Joe's comment about presenting a lesson on solving for y to get slope-intercept form:

Marty shared an example for the quadratic equation. In a lower level class, I would start with this approach. In a higher level class, I would use this as an intervention with students who struggle.

Prob and Stats Course: Advantages and Disadvantage

Easily the biggest challenge in this course the nature of the math, it is a different math course - a focus on analysis, which is open-ended. Students associate math with solving to get a single answer (sadly, this is true for linear functions).

What is great about statistics is that the real life applications are immediate and relevant. Following is a list:

• Line graphs: minimum wage in CT
• Dot plot: graph of cell phone prices for Verizon
• Histogram: graph of car prices for used Camrys
• Mean and median: cell phone prices - great to address outliers as shown in methods
• box plots (parallel): compare rents for apartments in New York vs Hartford
• scatterplot: used car prices and mileage
• correlation and regression: used car prices and mileage
• probability: lottery, determining car insurance premiums, determining how many passengers to book for a flight
• Two way tables and conditional probability: gender and t-shirt size
• inference: estimate mean height of all students at school using a sample mean

What I particularly like is the fact that most colleges and many or even most majors either require or recommend a stats course. I share this with seniors by explaining how the degree requirements work at a college. This gets their interest. The fact they need stats also gets their attention. Many of you can probably share where you saw stats used in your profession.

Here are links to a survey and data from the survey I used with my classes a couple years ago. You can easily use this in your classes. I used the data for many, even most of the topics listed above. E.g. height and shoe size for scatter plots (shoe size is not on this survey but I added it in a subsequent survey). The kids find the data interesting and intuitively understand it.

Reflection Assignment: First Week

Analyze your first week.

• What was most surprising (or caught you off guard)? Explain.
• What was most challenging? Explain.
• What went especially well for you? Explain.
• Identify one major adjustment you have or will need to make, if any. Explain.