My hopes for my capstone center on my desire to help students overcome the fear and anxiety they face when confronted with math. Unfortunately, fear of math evolves into dislike for math related content and that dislike is normalized by a mathphobic society. If students are given the space to process their math anxiety and taught practical habits for success in math I believe that all students are fully capable of performing math at high levels.
In terms of how my goals align with those of the program, I want to innovate my instructional practice by using technology in meaningful ways to increase the likelihood that my students are engaging with math content outside of the classroom so that they come to class more prepared to perform math. By helping my students to engage with math content at home (flipping my classroom) they will come to class with a reduced cognitive load, better able to focus on the transfer of content from working memory to long term memory, and less anxious about math. We are a pretty open and friendly cohort. We have many members who work at the same school sites which makes it easy for us to communicate our needs in person. For the last two semesters we have supported each other greatly through leaving encouraging and engaging comments on each others blogs. Their comments help me to think deeper while also giving me the confidence I need to make it through all the stress of teaching while working on a masters. I will continue to provide this support to my cohort as well as being responsive to any other needs. The only group norm that I can think of requesting is that we continue to have our work due on the Sunday nights of the week that assignments are due. We worked this out with the professors during our second semester as it gave us another day to complete work, with the understanding that we would all be timely in our responses to each other blogs. Im looking forward to working with this group of people for one more semester and then collaborating outside of the program after we graduate!
5 Comments
Tess
5/11/2019 09:30:20 pm
I immediately made a connection to your first paragraph. I often find that my students fear writing, therefore a sense of anxiety hovers over any writing project they are "forced" to tackle. Many of my upper grade students shared that they hated writing because they found it overwhelming. Like you, my goal is to use technology to alleviate that fear and anxiety, and help students discover how liberating and expressive writing can be. You are an amazing teacher. You are not only seriously looking for tools to help your students' fear of math, you are also showing them what a life-long learner looks like.
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Julie Lovie
5/12/2019 08:21:57 am
Brandon I would love to work with you more and talk with you about you math class that has students who fail already failed math 1 . I agree with all of your math concerns. When you look at how people feel about math it is a daunting task we have to change our students mindsets about math. I appreciate that there is a group of like minded teachers who have been through this program we should create a group of innovative math teacher who work to support our struggling math learners.
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Rafael Garcia Avila
5/14/2019 02:01:11 pm
Brandon,
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Caitlin Mitchell
5/14/2019 10:01:23 pm
I LOVE being in the same cohort as you! You have motivated me to improve my work and go out and try new things! I like the sunday night homework thing too...
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JP
5/14/2019 10:14:46 pm
I don't know how I would have gotten through this program without your support! I like how despite all of our different disciplines - we all have learned so much from each other!
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