Ms. Tsitsopoulos's Math Blog

Hello Everyone and welcome to my final blog of this semester.                 In todays class we learned the last strategy to use in our classrooms. As a recap, we have used a Gallery Walk and a Math Congress which were mentioned in my previous blogs. The focus of this blog is going to be unfolding the strategy called “Japanese Bansho.” Eloise et al., (2018) describe this method as an organizational strategy to facilitate multiple problem representations and better classroom communication. The term Bansho refers to the intentional use of board space for facilitating student learning, and everything written on the board is meaningful and significant (Eloise et al., 2018). Once the students have shared their ideas on the board you then can sort and classify the solutions according to similar methods used and in order of complexity.   This method is used for feedback to the students as there is no ...

Hello, and welcome to Blog Post #4!                In class today we used a strategy for problem solving called the Math Congress . A math congress “is a pedagogical approach in which students present their solutions from their mathematical work completed individually, in pairs, or in small groups, and share and defend their mathematical thinking” (Kotsopoulos & Lee, 2012, p. 1). Once the activity is finished, the students put up their work around the classroom and discussion takes place afterward on the students work. According to Kotsopoulos & Lee (2012), the Math Congress has four key roles in the classroom: To highlight and record key mathematical concepts, to indicate connections between various mathematical strategies, to assist in conceptual development, and to scaffold learning by drawing attention to the efficiency of particular strategies mentioned in the classroom. This strategy can be ex...

Colourbox. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.colourbox.com/image/problem-solving-word-cloud-concept-9-image- Hey everyone! Welcome to Blog Post #3           In today’s class we unfolded many important concepts around problem solving strategies and mathematical processes such as communicating, selecting tools and computational strategies. The challenging part of today’s class was being able to go from a student’s perspective and move to a teacher’s perspective and figure out how to unpack different ways to teach math. One part that really struck me was the endless amounts of examples of mathematical problems teachers have to solve. For example, I find it hard in our classes to make lesson plans for math classes without being in practice. I struggle a lot with differentiated learning ideas without knowing the students personally. Therefore, once I get into practice I will be able to relate to all of these problems on a greater level. Teaching math in its...

MACSER: It’s about the math. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.anl.gov/mcs/article/macser-its-about-the-math Hey everyone and welcome back to another blog!               Today our class focused on the key differences between conceptual and procedural (relational and instrumental) understanding, using resources for teaching and learning mathematics and using manipulatives for teaching/learning math. The first activity we did in class was a reading comprehension activity. We were given a short paragraph to read and we had to answer a couple questions. The activity is shown below in the image. This activity really opened my eyes to the reality of “you don’t need to understand the content to get a good mark.” No one in our class understood the context of this paragraph, however, we all got 4/4 for answering the questions correctly. The paragraph below is written using grammatical rules that you understand, the...