Summary: It was obvious Miller teaches by her core principles: gradual release of responsibility, quality of teacher over quantity of strategies, and allowing students to grow in the areas of choice, response, and collaboration over time. She really drilled the importance of figuring out a why behind every reason, sticking to your convictions as a teacher, and standing up for them when the time comes. Maybe your administers, peers, or parents may not always agree, but they will respect you if you stick to your convictions and have reasons to back up why. Like teaching any content area, teaching reading to its best requires a framework or guideline that you will stick by that you believe is best practice.
Even thought the topic of this article was about teaching reading, particularly to younger children, I was still able to pull a lot of useful information and apply it to teaching in general. Miller makes it clear that establishing convictions as a teacher and determining a how and a why behind teaching theories is impeccable. However, this only comes with time, mistakes, and trial and error. As a result of reading this article, I want to develop my own math teaching strategies and theories, why I believe each will work best, and be able to say them with conviction, confidence, and clarity. And when someone approaches me about the way I am doing something, I won’t be afraid but can calmly respond because I have already done my research.
After reading the results of a study on what good readers do, I altered each suggestion to apply to math and here is what I cam up with:
1) Use previous knowledge of math concepts during lecture, practice, application and homework.
2) Utilize or create visuals, pictures, and diagrams as an aid in helping them grasp/reinforce each concept
3) Use theory and reason to support their process and how they came to each conclusion
4) Throughout the lesson, guided practice, and especially their homework, students should be writing down any questions they have or problems they don’t know how to do; each class they will be given a time to find answers to each of their questions
5) Refer back to the objectives of the section, chapter and unit so they can keep those in mind throughout
6) Synthesize each lesson with the big picture of math
WOW! I love this list of math strategies you created! Will you make this into a handout and email it to me so that I can share it with our whole class? I also want to share it with this semester's content area reading class. THANKS!
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