Effective teaching and learning is a process that I will be continuing to analyse throughout my career of being a maths teacher
Effective teaching and learning is a process that I will be continuing to analyse throughout my career of being a maths teacher, this is only the beginning. Being a continual student means that I am able to look back on my experience and look at how I can improve myself. I feel as I have narrowed down my areas of development now that I have already got a year experience of teaching. I want to talk about where it went wrong and how I can improve myself to make sure that this will not be a returning factor in my future practice. I appreciate sometimes that mistakes can only be rectified through experience and more time in the classroom.
Looking at my effective learning within the classroom, I enjoyed exploring new concepts of maths; it would take me longer to grasp the mathematical idea of decision maths and finding the most critical path. Three of us (students) had turned up we decided to carry on the lesson with practicing critical even though the lesson was cancelled. I was lacking the confidence with this topic, but the other two (students) had a vague idea on how to find the critical path. We found a textbook and without guidance from the lecturer we worked together and eventually came to understand how to find the solution to the question. Boud (2001, p.g 3) put the term of peer learning as a ‘reciprocal learning activity’ which involves the sharing of information concepts and experience amongst the students (in this case). It moves from independent learning to ‘interdependent or mutual’ learning. Students learn to be able to explain their ideas learn how to organise their thoughts and plan learning activities so others can benefit from their ideas. Others are then able to give the feedback, this leading self-evaluation of their own learning. This is effective in the classroom as my job of struggling through explaining concepts when pupils do not apprehend through a person in a more authoritative. As Boud (2001) has suggested it will be more empowering for the students when mutual learning is taking place, giving more confidence to the pupils in their mathematical ability. I would try and use the pupils as much as possible to involve them in the learning and in some cases giving them scenarios or problem for them to solve within their peer groups. I do appreciate the need to give them the basic tools for students to implement those into the given mathematical problem. This was something that I found beneficial that the other two students in the group had an idea of how to solve the problem but we all had the skills that were needed to solve the problems in the textbook.
