TetzMathPortfolio
“Games have grown up, and playing them is no longer reserved for children. In fact, the ability to play may be the single most important skill to develop for the 21st century.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011)
Research Methods Program and Practice Evaluation
This was the one course in this degree program that wasn't just for our cohort. We were grouped with another cohort and their professor. The focus of this course was to be able to look at the components of a program and to decide whether or not a program was successful.
Knowing , Learning, and Teaching.
This class was different as it combined both video lectures by our Faculty Advisor, but also live online classes using blackboard. This class deeply explored complexity science and how it relates to education. This course had a profound impact on how I view teaching and learning because I view a classroom as a complex adaptive system where the classroom groups take on a personality themselves due to the fact that the experiences and personalities of those in the group coalesce into a group personality. Many refer to it as group dynamics, but I believe that what occurs is more complex than that.
Research Methodology in Education.
In this course we learned about different research methods through writing in that research style in assignments entitled "What I Did Today". We read journal articles about a new research style each week, watched a presentation about people in the field using that research style, and culimated each week with a "What I Did Today" paper written in that style. It was interesting to find a topic that would lend itself to a given research style. I found that research styles closest to how I view the world were the easiest to write and those that were outside my wheelhouse took more time and effort to write.
Designing Tasks for Mathematics Classrooms.
In this course we explored both the designing of mathematics tasks and notable persons in the field of mathematics research. For our task design project we had to present a task to the class, get feedback, and then re-submit the task with the changes made and the explanations as to why the changes were made. Each member of our class had to create a presentation on their person in the field and then present it to the whole group. By the end of the presentations, I felt I knew much more about people in the field.
Introduction to Mathematics Educational Research.
This course was more than just an introduction to educational research, it was also an introduction to using the online library to look for journals, scouring the internet to find articles, and relying on our cohort members to find ways to obtain copies of the journal articles we needed because not all of them were available in pdf at the university library. I read many different journals in this course to get the feel and tone of the various journals associated with educational research in mathematics. The reading list we received before we started our summer session, and the work that went into finding all the articles, meant we felt like old friends when we met for the first time.
Annotated Transcript - University of Calgary
Math Knowledge for Teachers
Our Cohort was lucky to have Anne Watson and John Mason in Calgary to teach us about focusing on creating tasks that expand the affordances and limited the constraints so that the task you create maximizes learning potential. Both Anne and John had a lot of insight about teaching mathematics to share with us, and we worked very hard to take it all in. We spent over 40 hours working with them and learned a lot about being designers of mathematical learning.
Concept Study
This was the only course in the M4T program taught by our faculty advisior. During the course we used a draft copy of the book to the left, and made suggestions about things that needed editing, suggestions we had for changes, and other feedback. We also worked on two concept studies; zero and functions. During both concept studies we traced the concepts use through the K-12 curriculum, identified how they related to the four grounding metaphors of addition, and how the different versions over the K-12 curriculum inter-relate. It was very interesting to see our co-hort who spanned the K-12 spectrum work together to see where concepts came from and where they ended up. I think this course gave everyone in our cohort a better understanding of the complexity of mathematics at all grade levels. Our names even made it onto the Acknowledgements page at the start of the book.
Survey of Curriculum Studies
In this cours we looked at mathematics education for those marginalized due to race, religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or in any other way. In this course , we again had to present on a person in the field but this time it had to be someone also addressing how students in those maginalized groups are affected. I chose Gloria Ladson-Billings because she talks not of finding a way to decrease the bar but of finding a way to support students to reach the bar that is set.
Collaboratory I: Curriculum
In this course we worked on the start of our capstone project. We had written many papers that were around our topic, but this was the course where we had to make some decisions about what we were going to include in our work, and start to fashion the start of our project. Although many things changed in our papers over the course of the next 6 months, this was where our project started to take shape. We were also introduced to research ethics and had to complete the TCPS 2: CORE ethics course.
Survey of Research in Mathematics Education
In this course we explored the concept of embodied mathematics. We looked at how using students physical experiences to build upon to explain mathematical concepts will help student understanding. We also had many discussions about whether or not experiencing the actions in a virtual manner was equally able to produce the same embodiment as in real life.
Writing Educational Research
This course came a little too late in the program roster for most of our cohort as we had started our Capstone projects back in the Winter or Summer of 2012, depending on how long it took us to settle on a topic. As a result, this course became about learning the finesse points about educational research and not as much about writing the research itself.
Collaboratory II: Curriculum
This is the course where I finished my Capstone project. I did a research project on how digital gaming could support student learning in mathematics classes. My final project was a one hundred and fifty page paper with 13 pages of references that I read over the span of my program. The title of my Capstone project is
No longer AFK:
How a Math video game and the complexity found within it could reengage and support Digitized Learners in mathematical learning
Summer 2011
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Winter 2013
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Mathematics for Teaching (M4T)
This Masters program was a cohort program, in which all of the members took the same courses at the same time. We built a community of knowledge that allowed us to have a common understanding of the inter-relation of all the learning we had done. It also allowed us to create a cohesive unit that worked to support each other so that we all became better and more knowledgeable for the experience. Each course helped us to build the knowledge and understanding about mathematics education necessary to complete our final Capstone project.