Week 3 Teaching Math for all our Learners

Back at it again and this week we are taking the time to focus on all of our learners. Yes that means more differentiated instruction. This was a big topic first year and continues to be stressed this year. Basically it comes down knowing your learner, planning appropriately for those learners and being willing and able to adapt your teaching styles for your students.

This class we focused on the different types of learners you may have in your classroom. The three learners we looked at were kinesthetic, auditory and visual. I myself am the farthest from an auditory learner, as I cannot stand listening to anyone, especially if they are barking instructions at me. I am probably something in between a kinesthetic and visual learner. I like to think I can notice and see things others cannot, always analyzing what I see in my head. I also focus on moving around and being athletic; I cannot sit still, which probably also makes me a kinesthetic learner.

We also attempted to create our own mini activity in class with some of the resources in our library. Catherine and I choose to do a simple trick with some dice.

Using three dice have a friend or student roll the dice and then stack them one on top of the other. Do not look, you don't want them to think you are cheating. Tell your friend or students you will find the sum of the five faces you cannot see.

The 5 numbers you cannot see are :
the bottom of the top dice
the top of the second dice
the bottom of the second dice
the top of the last dice
the bottom of the last dice

In your head subtract the very top face of the three dice from 21 to find the answer. Why is this the answer? Well the opposite faces of each die totals seven (1+6, 2+5, 3+4), and since you are subtracting the top number from the total of 6 faces, you subtract from 21. 

Finally the online portion discussed how we can learn from making mistakes and more importantly, how our learners can succeed from them. I believe in the idea of backwards design and I think making mistakes and backwards design go hand in hand. From the forum decided to choose to try seemingly wild ideas.In this forum we discussed strategies for teaching success from mistakes and decided that I think some learners will benefit from trying something new or something absurd. I know I personally would much rather be given some time to work at a problem, not knowing how to do it, and trying to figure it out myself than to be told how to do something and do it repeatedly for homework. That way if I don't figure it out, I will learn from my failures.