Parsons Inspiration

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My Inspiration

I am constantly inspired by my love of math and my love of students. Seeing how poorly a majority of students are doing in math both at my site and in the district motivates me to question why and to do something about this. I am still at the beginning of my journey looking into this question. I want to make students love math, to look at math as a puzzle and to be engaged in the process of playing and being creative with math. I am inspired to make a difference in the way students experience math; I am inspired to to help create a district where students walk into a math classroom and are not overwhelmed with anxiety and fear; I am inspired to make a difference.

Throughout my 11 years teaching I have constantly been engaging in professional growth and pushing my practice.  I spent four years focused on a specific math pedagogy as I engaged in a program with Loyola Marymount University. A portion of my final poster is to to the right.

Three years ago I came to New Technology High, after all of the work I had put into creating a math classroom, I felt like I was starting at zero again. Project Based Learning was new to me, and to push it even more, NTHS was transitioning to interdisciplinary projects. I was inspired to start this program so that I could push my practice in a PBL school that had access to technology and was continuously being innovative.

I hope to take what I have learned in the past and incorporate it into the new context of where i am now. NTHS has already implemented a blog portfolio as a graduation requirement. Blogging was something new to me and doing this research allowed me the opportunity to explore and run with this amazing tool that supports so many of the qualities we want our students to have.

I was inspired by my past experiences, my colleagues and my school site.

Below are two videos of people who have been an inspiration in the math world. They present ways to think about math and do math that makes engaging. Jo Boaler and Dan Meyer have helped lead and inspire a change in math classes.

A Sneak Peek into my Research

Abstract
As math scores in the school, district, state and nation are far below that of other countries and do not seem to be getting better, math needs to be looked at in a different way strategies need to be developed that will strengthen content knowledge. Studies indicate that often teachers struggle to implement a high quality PBL unit and have content rigor. A problem based high school located in California engaged in a 9th grade interdisciplinary project. During this PBL unit students blogged about their experience and their learning, pre and post test data and survey data was collected to determine how blogging throughout their project experience supports their math achievement. This research was necessary because math scores throughout the nation are very low. This study showed if blogging can support the content rigor within the project. It was found that students Math Inventory scores did increase; however, there was not a strong enough certainty that the increase in scores was due to the blogs. The study also showed that there was a positive correlation between students’ blog scores and their final math assessment scores.

Purpose
As math scores in our school, district, state and nation are far below that of other countries and do not seem to be getting better we need to look at math in a different way. Project Based Learning is a method of teaching that allows students to look at authentic problems and have voice and choice in how they approach and solve these problems. Some project based schools have moved toward a more problem based method when it comes to teaching the math so that they are able to cover all necessary content. During the pilot project students blogged about their experience and their learning. Most studies related to blogging did not address how well it supported acquisition of knowledge, but rather focused on the skills that were encouraged by blogging. This study addressed how blogging supports the mastery of math content by having students blog about the math content and their predictions about food insecurity; their blog scores were then compared to their final math assessment scores.

For more about my journey click the link below to explore my website and blog.

Research

Design Process

Support and Next Steps