Course Reflection

During the past 3 more months, this course helped me grow personally and professionally through various types of learning. This Inquiry (I) course has been very challenging but it is a rewarding learning experience without a doubt. I have learned a lot about myself and teaching as inquiry-based.  I want to thank Professor Gerofsky for sharing so many wonderful resources with us. 

I feel the course is challenging because for some recommended articles it is a little bit hard for me to grasp the full meaning of all valuable points that authors want to reveal. I need to read them several times to dig deeper. My reading speed did not allow me to read several times at that time. So now I am going through all Professor's blogs and checking if I have downloaded all articles and saved all links of the videos and important notes on my blog. I just found that I missed a blog titled " From Ivan: Traditional Indonesian Batik and Math Learning". I will post its information and the link of the video on my blog too. And for some articles I know I will read them again.  For example, I will read and rethink two articles  "Mathematics education for sustainability", " Pedagogical sensitivity". Good books and articles are worth been read multiple times. 

I enjoyed reading "On becoming a reflective teacher" which helps me understand why and how to become a reflective teacher. I enjoyed the online forum seminar. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer helped us as non-indigenous teachers understand the indigenous culture and the relationship between ecology and indigenous ideology.  We also had an interesting experience of making rope and multi-strand braid. When I saw our Professor braiding while talking on the other side of the screen and all classmates were working on their own handcraft I felt we were a big family. That scene is in my heart forever.  

For Inquiry (II), if we use Blog I will post relevant course notes other than required posts. I will continue to work on my inquiry topic on how to create a positive learning environment in a Math classroom, but this time I will focus on how to make math interesting. There must be many strategies and methods we can use to teach Math, to make students like Math so that the whole atmosphere for learning Math is joyful. While no matter what topic I will choose for the next course, what I learned from this course is being a reflective teacher, which means continuously thinking about how I should teach better and where it needs to be improved.

 

Reflection on Assignment 3:

Our group's topic is "Creating a Positive Healthy Math Classroom Environment." When I was searching on it, I found this topic is broad. It involves many things. I tried to narrow this topic and focused on one or two key points. Although the whole idea of the presentation sounds a bit blur, we tried to focus on the importance of emotions in learning mathematics. I also wanted to involve much good advice from my teachers. In fact, my SA also gave me many great ideas on this topic. She has a well-managed classroom. She emphasizes building a rapport with students and getting to know your students. She showed me how to think from students' perspectives and put ourselves in our students' shoes.

Next time, I want to focus on the topic: How to Make Math Interesting. In order to focus on the main idea of the presentation, this topic wasn't talked about in detail. Making Math Fun is also a curtail aspect to keep a positive learning environment. Teachers could use various ways to teach Math. The way Math is taught could make learning enjoyable and fun or boring and difficult. I think this is also about how we engage students in learning mathematics. 

Through working on this project, I learned many concepts, such as strengths-based approaches, emotional engagement, problem-based learning, etc. I will keep learning on this meaningful topic. 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SeEUc4EGyaD5YlhQP5o3P7lOYeQu2TtF3ho6u4y3PXY/edit#slide=id.p