Gilbert, M. J., & Coomes, J. (2010). What Mathematics do high school teachers need to know?. Mathematics Teacher, 103(6), 418.
In this article,the authors puts a teacher's knowledge into two categories: knowledge of mathematics content and knowledge of pedagogy (teaching). The authors talk about the need for teachers to use their knowledge about the content and pedagogy to sufficiently to teach the students, and they stress the importance of teachers adapting their knowledge to the way their students learn. They also need to be able to interpret their students solutions and adjust the content and teaching style to assist the students. An example of this was given with a teacher that asked a group of 6th graders to complete a problem dealing with ratios. After looking at the student's results, the teacher noticed that most of the students didn't fully understand their task and got the question wrong. The teacher then noted that she needed to change the content for the students that next week and that she also needed to teach this concept differently. By being willing to adapt our knowledge to the current situation, will help us more accurately help the students we will teach.
I agree that teachers need to change, or adapt, their knowledge for their students. When teachers change their knowledge of pedagogy, they are sometimes able to help their students learn better. When students get more of an understanding of math it may improve their confidence in being able to do math. Changing the way the teachers teach is not the only thing. Teachers can change their knowledge of the content. By doing this, they can more change the way the content is explained. This change may help students apply the content outside of class and in the real world. It can also give students a greater appreciation for math because of the way was learned. Teachers need to able to adapt their knowledge at all times for their students. When they do this, they become better teachers.
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My guess is that the second sentence is the topic sentence for the summary paragraph. Am I right? I liked the distinction between content knowledge and knowledge of pedagogy. I wasn't quite sure, though, what it meant for teachers to adapt their content knowledge. The description of the example helped me see that the authors tried to illustrate what this meant. But I needed a description of how the teacher adapted her knowledge after obtaining the results from the ratio task in order to understand what it meant to adapt knowledge.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the topic sentence for the second paragraph clearly presented your stance toward the main idea of the article. I would have liked specific examples in this section to illustrate the reasons why you thought that adapting knowledge was important.
You did a great job identifying and presenting the main ideas of this article. However, I feel like in the last paragraph you mostly reiterated what the author was saying rather than saying what you think. Overall, it was quite good.
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