TEAC 888
Fowler/Heaton/Smith/Pierce
Fall 2008
The Journal Assignment and
How to Respond to Others’ Journal Assignments in Blackboard Discussion Groups
Use for Journal Assignments #2, #3, & #4
Keeping this journal is an opportunity to reflect on issues in teaching within your own math teaching. The space to find action research questions is found in the context of an identified issue of teaching. Issues in teaching often arise in the zone between what you or others (NCTM Principles and Standards, for example) think should be theoretically happening in your classroom and what actually happens in your practical work with students.
The purpose of this journal is to help yourself better understand an issue in teaching you have already identified or hinted at in the teaching reflection you submitted on campus on Saturday.
Journals will be due on Mondays by midnight of your time zone. Each journal assignment should be posted in the Discussion Board on Blackboard.
To proceed with this journal, do the following:
1)Return to the Teaching Reflection you wrote in class.Consider how the issue you identified or hinted at is related to or plays out in your own teaching. Your issue that you will eventually study needs to be related somehow to your teaching practice. If it doesn’t seem to be related right now, you need to modify it over time so it does relate. Keeping this journal should help you figure out if there is a relationship.Look for evidence of the relationship between your identified issue in teaching and your classroom practice and write about 2 pages about it. It must be at least 1.5 pages long (single spaced).
2)To get started writing, respond to the following prompts as they relate to a single math class period in the week before each journal is due or your math teaching across that particular week as a whole:
a)What is one mathematical topic you taught this week that you wish would have gone better?Describe this topic from your math teaching this week that did not go exactly as you hoped it would. What happened or what’s going on? How did you teach it? What did you do? What did students do? Why?
b)Describe the mismatch between what you hoped would happen and what actually happened or the nature of your dissatisfaction.
c)What are the typical difficulties students have with this topic?
d)How did this year’s class do with this topic compared with past classes?
3)Describe how this topic relates to a larger issue in teaching (See the NCTM Principles andStandards, for example) and why this issue or point of dissatisfaction is worth knowing more about. Why is this topic important to you? What are reasons this topic could be important to others?
Journal Responses are due on Saturdays, also by midnight of your time zone. Post your journal response using the Reply feature in the Blackboard Discussion Board.
Once the journals in your discussion group are posted, you are responsible for responding to at least two of the journal assignments posted by people in your discussion group each week. As you respond make comments about the following:
1)Are you able to understand what happened in the episode being described? Can you understand the nature of the person’s dissatisfaction? If something isn’t clear to you, ask questions. You will all become better writers if people ask you to clarify your thoughts.
2)Can you see how what the person described relates to an issue of teaching? Do you see connections that the person who wrote the journal doesn’t see? Do you have ideas about why this issue or point of dissatisfaction is important to teachers? Do you think it’s a trivial issue? If so, can you think of a way to recast the issue or the point of dissatisfaction to make it more substantive and important? Remember, your role is not to fix the problem or try to make the person more satisfied. Please don’t offer advice about practice. The goal is to help each other learn what it means to mull over an important issue of teaching.
3)What questions about teaching, learning, and mathematics does this journal entry raise for you? Pose three questions back to the author of the journal. The questions don’t need to be answered directly necessarily. The questions are practice for the responder to think about what it means to inquire about teaching, learning, and mathematics.