|
Peter Appelbaum |
|
Leif Gustavson |
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215-572-4476 Office Hours Mon. 4-5,
Wed. 3-5 or by appt. |
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215-572-2118 Office Hours Mon. 4-5,
Wed. 3-5 or by appt. |
TENTATIVE
SCHEDULE LINK
COURSE
Welcome!
To engage with our
students as persons is to affirm our own incompleteness, our consciousness of
spaces still to be explored, desires still to be tapped, possibilities still to
be opened and pursued… We have to find out how to open such spheres, such
spaces, where a better state of things can be imagined … I would like to
think that this can happen in classrooms, in corridors, in schoolyards, in the
streets around. --Maxine Greene, “In
Search of a Critical Pedagogy”
“You teach
reading?” she asked. “The poster said we could get extra help if we
needed it.” “We sure do,” Sister Shani
said. “We got to know how to read. How else we going to know what’s
going on in the world? We teach history and math, too. And
sewing. You get to make yourself a long dress. And we teach the history
of the way black people in this country talk, how it’s a lot like some
African languages. And tell your friends we teach karate, too. That ought to
bring some of them in.” Eloise Greenfield, Sister
Do you live? 2nd grade student note to a teacher
Four questions guide our
course:
·
How can we meet the skill and concept goals of a core
curriculum in ways that are personally meaningful to students and teachers?
·
What does it mean to be a mathematician?
·
What kinds of information do teachers need to know
about students and student work to make informed pedagogical decisions?
·
How do we perform what we know?
This semester focuses on
inquiry, teaching mathematics, and assessment, which provide a context for
refining and integrating curricular practices you have learned in other
education classes. Our course on campus is supported by field experiences at F.S.
Edmonds, C.W. Henry Elementary Schools, and J.F. McCloskey in Philadelphia. As
you learn new concepts and techniques in this class, you will have the
opportunity to try them out with students. We will give specific attention to
how to work with children to identify and explore essential questions and how
they connect to a specific curricular unit coming out of the Core Curriculum; how
to design and implement strategies for supporting/facilitating student work and
learning on these skills and concepts; and how to inform our teaching through
multiple ways of assessing/evaluating this work.
In this course, you are asked
to think and act like a teacher. Just as your job is to get
the elementary students to help each other think and act mathematically, our
job together is to help each other think and act pedagogically. We will wrestle
with the job of developing meaningful inquiries that speak to the district
concerns about curriculum content and standardized testing goals. In the
process, you will respond with your own original pedagogical ideas.
One important comment
about this semester: In some ways you
may be able to use this course as a warm-up to the student-teaching practicum,
because you are gaining experience in working with groups of children. However,
this is primarily a course with particular content that has not been covered in
previous courses. You will develop skills that you need to be an effective
teacher. Be prepared for this semester to challenge you in many ways!
Not only will you be testing out the kind of teacher you hope to become; you
will be asked to practice new ways of teaching that you have never experienced
yourself as a student. Never lose sight of something: if you have come this far
in the major, then you already know a lot about teaching and learning;
use what you know to help you integrate the new arts and sciences of teaching
that this semester asks you to practice.
Required
Texts (from 341 and 342):
Burns, Marilyn. 2000. About
Teaching Mathematics: A K-8 Resource. Pearson Learning.
ISBN: 094135525X.
Moon, Jean & Linda Schulman. 1995. Finding the Connections: Linking Assessment,
Instruction, and Curriculum in Elementary Mathematics.
Photocopies of other required readings will be
available in class. You will also be asked to view material on Blackboard
and the internet.
Your grade will be based on five
parts:
|
Mathematician’s
Notebook |
15% |
|
Teacher’s Portfolio |
30% |
|
Critical Conversations |
20% |
|
Final Piece |
20% |
|
Participation in campus
meetings beyond the minimum expectation of attendance (posing and solving
problems, for example) |
15% |
Mathematician’s
Notebook
Our course begins with an
opportunity to explore what it means to be a mathematician. We will do this by
pursuing mathematical investigations as groups and individuals. Your
mathematician’s notebook provides tools to pursue these investigations.
It also prepares you to utilize this kind of notebook with your students. The criteria for this notebook is described on the Notebook
Specification Sheet and we will discuss it in detail in class.
Teacher’s Portfolio:
As a way of organizing your
work and making your process transparent, you will develop a portfolio that
will be organized around the following processes and products: Planning,
Assessment, and Inquiry/Research. This portfolio is described in detail on the
Portfolio Specification sheet.
One way in which we will use
Blackboard is to develop an online community reserved for an essential teacher
practice: developing a safe place where you can be critical about your teacher
self. For the first six weeks of the course, these conversations will help us
examine the nature of mathematics and what it means to be a mathematician. Once
in the schools, we expect these conversations to help you change the way you
work with children in classrooms, to help you realize something new that you
would like to implement, and most importantly to allow you to take risks within
your teaching. You will be evaluated based on a set of seven criteria.
After seven weeks of intense
experience working with and teaching children, it will be time to take action
on what you have learned. The teaching experience will stir up many thoughts,
questions, and ideas that you have around teaching and learning. This final
piece provides you the opportunity to spend the last few weeks of this class
reflecting on what you have learned and what you are thinking about at that
point, and then designing a way to take action on an aspect of your teaching.
Here’s another way of looking at this final assignment: What’s the
next step in your teaching? As a teacher, what do you feel you need or want to
do with what you have learned about teaching in this class?
Attendance is mandatory in a
class such as this. Without you here, we are lacking as a whole and will miss
your contributions. Particularly since much of the work we do in class will
depend upon partnering and small work groups, your contribution is a must for
not only your success but the success of your peers as well. More than two
absences from
In order for this course to
be meaningful and successful, it is essential that you take responsibility for
your own learning. We want you to participate by sharing ideas, trying things
out that you are not sure of, and supporting your colleagues (and professors!)
taking risks as well.