During this field experience, I had the opportunity to create worksheets and notes to help my students understand concepts and practice their newly acquired skills. Certain topics (e.g. finding the midpoint of a line) were easier than others. Because of this, some topics needed more detailed notes and more worksheets to allow students to better develop their understanding. The topic that my CST class found the most difficult during my time with them was finding the distance from a point to a line. As my CT put it, these kinds of problems are very procedural and could even be considered a mini-situational problem. Most students were able to do the steps individually but were unable to connect them to solve the entire problem, especially students who were weaker with the material from the year before. Attached below is a worksheet/notes I created for my students as a ‘last resort’ to help them understand the procedure to follow; after more than a week of working on it, students were still not understanding so something had to change. I would also like to note that this was less than a month into the field experience. This being said, I conferred with several other teachers in the department to try to see how to help my students and if my methods were appropriate (competency 10, 11).
The worksheet (which I created using LaTeX, a program which allows users to create documents with professional graphs and equations) has a problem on the first page and the subsequent headings give the steps required to solve the problem. I also gave the first part of the solution (i.e. the equation to use) for each step to help students see what they needed to do and help them along the path. Before the class when I had planned to distribute the worksheet, I made a representation of the question on Desmos to help students visualize each individual step of the problem (see the video attached below). (Competencies 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 12)
When going over the problem, students were quite well-behaved and paid attention because they all understood that it was vital for them to understand how to solve problems of this type. Afterwards, they appeared to have a good understanding of the concept; students were able to determine what steps to do and the only mistakes that were made were minor computational mistakes. I was quite happy with how this lesson turned out.
Kevin Paquette 