Reflect on your own presentation: What worked well, what didn’t? How did you implement elements of effective teaching of mathematics into your lesson? Support your reflection with readings from the unit

During my presentation of Assessment task 2, I spent quite a lot of time trying to comprehend a range of different teaching strategies to make sure I focused on the teaching when presenting, as I have always believed that a student can be taught as much information humanly possible but they will not understand it unless they are taught it the correct way for their individual learning style.

I focused on clear lesson goals, feedback and mastery learning. Mastery learning was a teaching strategy that I had never heard of but once I learnt more about it the more, I found it crucial for mathematical learning. Mastery learning involves leaving all elements of a maths lesson the same, just varying the time students have to complete certain activities to suit their learning needs. ‘An effective teacher is one who maximises the achievements of students by acting in accordance with an explicit set of principles that have order, coherence, and relevance in the particular instructional context’ (Cole & Chan., 1986:64).

My activity that I presented worked well. I demonstrated a number line on paddle pop sticks with a number missing and asked students to fill in that space with a peg that had the correct number on it. After presenting this activity to students, I heard lots of different variated ideas of how this could be presented to a class and thought about how I could have incorporated those ideas as well.

Reflecting on my presentation I believe that I achieved the set outcomes, but would have like to be more confident in my presentation and have some feedback time where I could have incorporated others ideas into my own to benefit future mathematical teaching.

References:

Killen. R., (2006) Effective teaching strategies; Lesson from research and practice, Fourth Edition