While I was student teaching, I was introduced to the wonderful world of CGI or Cognitively Guided Instruction. This is a student-centered approach to teaching math. It builds on natural number sense and students are guided by their own intuition. They are given a problem like the one shown and are not given instruction about what to do next. I would encourage the student to work by asking, "How would you go about solving this problem?" When given the word problem there are 2 jellyfish in the ocean. Each jellyfish has 4 tentacles. How many tentacles are in the ocean? The student in this picture knew that they could draw a picture of 2 jelly fish with 4 legs and count up the legs. This is a Kindergarten student and they are doing the basics of multiplication without instruction! My goal towards professional growth as an educator is to become professionally trained in CGI as I truly believe when students are allowed to construct their own interpretation for math, rather than given the instruction or algorithm, they form a deeper conceptual understanding. This helps build the important foundations for more challenging math later in their student careers. |
Here is an example of a different CGI problem that is a bit more challenging. I annotated that this child counted by 5's, 6 times to come the solution. This child knew that he wanted to count by 5's right away. He actually started counting on his fingers but I asked him to show his work so I can see his thinking. He drew 6 different jellyfish. At a closer look, you may notice this child did not actually draw 5 tentacles on each jellyfish. In his head, he already knew he was going to attempt the problem by counting by 5's and bypassed counting each leg out (some jellies were cut off from the bend in the page). |
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I have included my scholarly paper of my 5 year plan. Here I describe the different professional development courses I plan to take in the next 5 years. This paper also explains the rationale behind my decisions for the courses and certifications I plan to accomplish in my first five years of teaching. These plans will help me grow in the legal, ethical and professional obligations as described in the TPE 12 and 13 in my role as an educator. |