EDI 331- workshops 2 and 3

Workshop 2: Math Workshop style lessons can be characterized in many ways. In my opinion, a Math Workshop will include some sort activity to get students to think through problems rather than having the teacher tell students what to do. The book Minds on Mathematics talks about how we need to give students the opportunity to think and develop their own thinking first. Quite often people think of math classes as teacher lectures and then students repeat the process in their homework. Using a Math Workshop, teachers should allow their students to think about the math themselves and construct their own way of thinking about the problems. There is more than one way of doing math problems and sometimes students know more about math then we give them credit for.

Workshop 3: When I hear the phrase, "Improve teaching, not teachers," I have to stop and think about what I am learning now as a education student. Growing up and even now, when students don't do well on something the teacher is the first to be blamed. More often, it should be the student who should be blamed rather than the teacher for not putting the time or effort into the task. There are times however, that it is not the student or teacher who is to blame for someone not understanding a topic. As someone going into education, I am amazed by the number of requirements and standards that teachers are expected to teach students in a short period of time. On top of this short time frame, each teacher must teach to multiple students who all learn in different ways. I have had many amazing teachers who try their best to teach the same lesson in multiple ways during class to help teach as many students as possible. But lets be honest here... There is no way of teaching every person in the way they learn best during every class. There was a line from the book The Teaching Gap that really stood out to me. "Our students are being shortchanged. They could be learning much more and much more deeply than they are learning now " (Page 5). In my education classes we continue to learn how it is better to get students to think for themselves before going over how to do the problems. Allowing students to develop their own level of understanding is better then just giving them the information and asking them to repeat the process in their homework. This would be great if teachers were not given so many standards and requirements that they need to teach. I believe most teacher will try to give students time to develop their thinking but in some cases there just isn't the time for this to happen. In the end, I do agree with the phrase, "Improve teaching, not teachers" because the teachers are doing what they are told to teach and not necessarily teaching how they want to teach.