How can I
(1) engage newcomers in my discipline in cycles of inquiry?
I can engage newcomers in my discipline in cycles of inquiry by not basing mathematics on specific interpretations, but instead help them to create different strategies for studying and interpreting word problems. I feel as if learning math is hard and discouraging when you continuously don’t know how to do the problems. Newcomers will be able to be engaged if they first learn how to study for math and interpret word problems because this will help them to correctly complete problems. Correctly answering and continuously doing well is encouraging, motivating and will engage newcomers in my discipline.
(2) Engineer and scaffold their success?
I can engineer and scaffold their success by introducing different reading strategies grounded in transactional reading. It is important that I, as a future educator, encourage my students and newcomers to math, to bring their own knowledge that they have to the classroom. I can have them compare their own real life experiences to things in the textbook such as word problems. They can also engage in a dialogue with the author and transform the author’s meaning and interpret it to their own (Pearson & Fielding, 1991). The three strategies in the article I read were based off of transactional reading. These strategies are Say Something, Cloning an Author, and Sketch-to-Stretch. The Say Something strategy “is based on the assumption that a reader’s comprehension results from an evolving dialogue with both the text and other readers” (Borasi et al 1998). Cloning an Author is when “readers are asked to stop reading whenever they choose and to write what they regard as important ideas on cards. After they have finished reading the text in this manner, they are asked to arrange their cards to show the relationships among ideas” (Borasi et al, 1998). Finally, the strategy Sketch-to-Stretch has students actually draw out their interpretations of the text and then share their interpretive drawing others. Incorporating these strategies in the classroom will help students learn. All students learn differently and having the students try all of these should help them find one that works for them. Once they find a strategy that works, they will learn better, do well with the discipline and will then be more engaged.
Borasi, R., Siegel, M., Fonzi, J., & Smith, C. F. (1998). Using transactional reading strategies to support sense-making and discussion in mathematics classrooms: An exploratory study.Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29(3), 275-305.
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I love how your sentence structure is simple and easy to follow your train of thought. I foucsed more on the scafolding parts in my blog; when you say you’d provide different reading strategies, do you have any particular in mind? What approaches would work for a class and not with other classes? What will work for one student might not work for another. Having multiple approaches on how to tackle a math question is vital for the student to have the best understanding of the problem as possible. The three strategies of Say Something, Cloning an Author and Sketch-to-Sketch are well explained and simple to follow. However, as future educators, we must expect the unexpected; What kinds of lessons could these strategies best be suited for? Any lessons in which this would not be helpful? How would you dive further into these strategies if asked directly?
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I really relate to your post, because I am also going to be a secondary math teacher and read this same article for this weeks post. I thought the reading strategies presented were very interesting and made me think more about how much reading is involved in math in a way that there’s strategies for students to comprehend the information they are learning. in different ways. I liked your ideas of how to try and engage your students more in the classroom, but with our field of math it seems as though it is hard to engage students in the classroom because a lot of people do not like the subject. But with that we are always going to have someone that doesn’t like what we are doing in the classroom most likely. Overall your post was very interesting and relatable.
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