Team Teaching

Team Roster:
Sarah Harnum
Kim Burrage
Susan Whitten (me)

Team Goal:
Teach future teachers about a grade 4 lesson plan centred around a theme of estimation.

Game plan:

• We got together to decide on a topic and formed some opinions on what we would like to see happen.
• We decided that instead of addressing the class as if they were pretending to be grade 4’s, we wanted to propose an idea to future teachers for their classrooms.
• We looked through multiple education oriented resources such as Teaching Children Mathematics and Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School searching for the “perfect” problem.
• We wanted a problem that was different from what we had seen in previous team teaching lessons and we knew the problem had to be student-centred and inquiry based. This meant that our problem had to pose a question or task to our students and have them use a personal choice of mathematical strategies in order to solve it.
• When looking through Teaching Children Mathematics I came across a problem called “Counting is for the Birds” which I really liked. It dealt with estimation (something that hadn’t been taught yet in our class), and it asked the students to use whichever strategies they wanted (student-centred) to answer a question (inquiry-based).
• We chose to give the class 4 minutes on this task as we wanted to keep the time-frame small so that students wouldn’t be able to count every bird.
• After they had come up with methods, we wanted to get students to come to front of the class and explain how they got their answer. This gave a chance for all students in the class to see various estimation strategies.
• At the end of the class we wanted to emphasize that this lesson could be altered for a range of grades (by changing the complexity level of the picture) and that the outcomes could be diverse as well. Younger students could gain number sense of “bigger” and “smaller” or older students could learn new methods of estimating accurately and efficiently.

Post game reflection:
After completing our lesson there were a few things I wish had gone a little differently:

• I feel that the lesson was too short. The students completed their estimations in a very short amount of time which then pushed us to continue with the conclusion of our lesson. If completing the lesson again I would ask the students more questions like: “Show me 3 different ways you could estimate the number of birds” or I could use a more complex picture that had various “distraction” details in it such as trees or airplanes.
• I also would have had the discussion session continue for longer. I would have liked to get the students to ask more questions regarding their peers’ solutions and I would have liked more students to share their solutions in general.
• Finally, I feel that our outcome was not emphasized as much as it could have been. This could have been different if we asked the students to classify the strategies by characteristics; such as “used number sense of more or less”, “used division and multiplication” or “used grouping”.

Overall I feel that the team teaching experience, both as a teacher and student in the classes was a thought provoking learning experience. On the student side, I was forced to use my mathematical knowledge and determination to solve problems which we diverse and entertaining. As a teacher in the class I had to think about the characteristics of my problem and my students in order to give them the best learning opportunity possible. It was a rewarding chance to see the potential of mathematics in the classroom and will push me to continue learning about inquiry-based, student-centred teaching in the future.