My Residency Classroom
Student presents his floor plan draft for peer critique.
During the 2022 - 2023 school year, I worked as a 10th grade math teacher resident through the San Diego Teacher Residency program at High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Paired with an experienced mentor teacher, I had a unique opportunity to apply and refine the pedagogy I was learning in my classes and build experience in teaching, planning, grading. My takeover consisted of a unit on 2D and solid geometry anchored in an interdisciplinary project about affordable housing that I co-designed and exhibited with my humanities teaching partner, and carried through to the end of the year with finals and presentations of learning.
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Some key features of my classroom are:
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Learning Mindset
Language and norms are focused on growth, and mistakes are celebrated as opportunities to learn. Students bring questions, mistakes, and works-in-progress to the board to engage the whole class in mathematical discussion. Students go through multiple rounds of peer critique, self-assessment, and revision on project work. Assignments are all open for revision and improvement to encourage perseverance and the pursuit of mastery.
Authentic Math
Students relate mathematics to themselves and the world through projects, contextualization, and reflection. Projects build mathematical skills in an authentic context, answering big questions and tackling big issues. Community partners show how they use math in their careers, like statistical analysis in public health and geometry in architecture. Lessons incorporate authentic examples and applications, and students grow in their identity as mathematicians in their language, skills, and mindset.
Student-Led Discussion
Lessons are designed to feature rich tasks with room for different representations and strategies, inviting learners of all styles. After individual and small group work time, the lesson centers on student-led discussion (guided by Smith and Stein's Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions.) Students take on agency and mathematical authority as they communicate their ideas in the public forum, advancing the mathematical understanding of the class and building community and positive interdependence.
Authentic Self
Different personalities, interests, learning styles, cultures, and communication styles are all welcomed and their mathematical brilliance is elevated. Lessons are designed and facilitated with Universal Design for Learning in mind, using multiple modalities, building in scaffolding, and offering extension/challenge options. Students practice meaningful choice in their projects and classwork and reflect frequently on their understanding, their progress, and the effectiveness of their work. Cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge are accessed and celebrated.
Visual Representations and Visible Thinking
Class routines include plentiful opportunities for thinking out loud, including notice/wonder protocols, pair shares, group work routines, and class discussions. Students are warmly encouraged to "say more!" and "say your becauses," and to draw pictures or other visual representations that link their ideas. In our solid geometry unit, for example, we used illustration, blocks, plastic solids, paper nets, modeling software, and even cardboard and foam board constructions to visualize and compare solids.
Complex and Critical Thinking
Students engage in deep, complex thinking, working through tasks to create rich mathematical understanding. Lessons are designed to give students opportunities to personally create key mathematical understandings (for instance, what formulas mean/why they work) rather than just receiving information through lecture. Sense-making and reasoning are elevated, as opposed to speed and memorization. Students engage their critical thinking by exploring and critiquing social systems and imagining a more just world.
Student doodle of "my catchphrase"
