Curricular Co-Teaching Reflection

This was an interesting experience. For this assignment, there were a couple switch-ups from the non-curricular teaching assignment:

1. Co-teaching instead of solo, which presented its own challenges
2. Teaching a part of the BC Mathematics Curriculum (in our case, Workplace Mathematics 10 - Creating and interpreting bar graphs)

Self-Evaluation (Carson)

Self-Evaluation (Krystal)

Self-Evaluation (Nizar)

(Nizar has informed us that his self-assessment contained all 3's and no comments.)

Peer Evaluation (Jasmine)

Peer Evaluation (Josh)

Peer Evaluation (Brandon)

Peer Evaluation (Andy)

Peer Evaluation (Manveen)

Peer Evaluation (Sahl)

Some conclusions I can arrive at from my own experience and wishes, and the evaluations

• Generally, the lesson was very well-received. I think that there was a consensus on preparedness of the lesson contents itself, which I completely agree with. A lot of time and consideration went into the lesson plan and the slides, and I would argue that it was the strongest point of our lesson.
  
  
• A pain point once again: timing. Although the plan ended up becoming one that did not cover some extra slides and activities for each section, I realize that it was a double-edged sword that ended up being slightly disadvantageous to us. Since our content and activity potential was there, it was a bit painful to adapt to having less time than we had planned for! I'm sure that everyone saw the extra slide content to cover. It would've been nice to cover the graph on phone ownership at a school and commentating on it. It would've been nice to look a bit more in depth at the graph of our classmates' net worths and having humorous commentary on that. There were also many opportunities for student participation embedded in the slides that also could've served as exit slip material, but we ended up deciding somewhat last minute which ones to keep (ended up being two write-and-discuss questions and an exit slip activity).
  
  
• The exit slip activities were also well-received conceptually and in practice. Once again though, I feel that trying to squeeze as much as we did into the 20 minutes was very challenging. I would like to do something like this again, as a means to ensure participation and engagement with the material. At this time I'm still sorting out the kinks in my head regarding the allowance of exit slips as homework if not submitted at the end of the class, but I think the peer pressure of write-AND-discuss could help alleviate this. It's a bit like an applied think-pair-share, which wasn't explicitly stated by any of the assessment feedback forms but I could definitely see it. The freedom to apply the concepts was also well-received, and I could see myself doing it more often as a way to connect practicality to theory for a variety of other subjects.
  
  
• Our demonstration was also well-received, since they allowed student input. We probably should've asked them to raise their fingers AFTER setting up the whiteboard because I remember hearing cries of tired arms before. One thing I saw from a classroom that I visited this week was portable whiteboards for each student/table pairing; instead of raising fingers, they could raise a wider range of signals by writing/drawing on the whiteboard and raising it up (which was also good for anonymity, which helps shy or introverted students be motivated). That could blend well with this format. I think we could've practiced the demonstration process a little bit more in order to alleviate timing issues, or factored in the time it takes to write on a whiteboard. I'd like to thank Nizar for doing this :)
  
  
• The tutorial section was well-received, though I agree that it'd be nicer to get students involved just a little more. The design was that we could get every student to answer a part of the part-identifying slides, but possibly due to the classroom dynamics we ended up reverting to the shout-out-the-answer style. I remember noticing this because during my classroom volunteering in my previous math teacher's classroom in 2023, I was given the chance to teach the coordinate grid to grade 8 mini school students. I employed the exact same answering style at the time, but on the feedback paper I got, my teacher recommended following a hand-raising/calling students strategy if possible in order to get an equal distribution of answerers instead of a single student monopolizing the answers (which definitely happened). As a time-saving measure, we were going to simply run through the tutorial slides in a lecture format (especially considering that we had flipped classroom as part of our planning context), but if we wanted to spend our minutes more liberally, taking our time to stop and get student input would add to the richness of the lesson where the students could approach a harmony with the teacher as a facilitator instead.
  
  
• In terms of the content we did include, I discussed with Susan after class ended and realized that there was a completely missed opportunity to include data on the MANY ONGOING ELECTIONS, which is rife with bar graph potential. Not only that, but there is a major tie in with the field of social studies, a real world tie in with personal political choices, and very importantly: addressing data literacy! How often do you read a newspaper that implies itself to be neutral, pinky promise, then they insert an axis break that makes it look like the party they don't support is way further behind than they actually are? Or perhaps they employ some sort of psychology with their choices of categories, or graph orientation. If we had more time, this would've been an amazing activity around the end of the exit slip activities. Honestly, I feel like this was the biggest missed content opportunity now that I've written about it here. Current events will certainly make their way onto a graph unit for me. I've also run a series of daily polls for high school students before on my online platforms for high school esports using Discord emoji reactions, like this image (if you want to see more, I'd be happy to share!):
  
  
  
  Incorporating fun daily polls like the one from the demonstration could get students engaged much like the one used for our demonstration, but also very excited as they can insert their own thoughts in a fun poll format which they indeed do love -- it was one of the most popular activities on my platform! Even shy or reserved platform users enjoyed entering their answers despite their vote being publicly displayed. This also comes from careful poll question design that ensures the *safety* of every poll option, which is another topic that could come up in the creation of the data collection process. We could also ask similar questions and talk about things like correlation and probability. Lots of ideas, but I digress.
  
  
• As a last point, it was an interesting experience being paired with my partners. There were some linguistic barriers with Nizar whose first language is not English, so we had to scaffold him with the ELL-centered mindset that we learned from our ELL courses. The goal was to help him navigate our workflow and lesson planning, but also making sure that he didn't simply fall for the Socratic method such that he simply "did as he was told". As a result, we got great contributions from him, from the demonstration on the whiteboard to gathering the bar graphs that we saw on the slides. This was definitely one of the biggest challenges for me in this co-teaching activity, but I think that made it all the more valuable as an experience. Thank you Nizar for working with us!
• That being said, my personal criticism for myself is that it's okay to take the backseat if things are doing well. If we're going overtime, that's fine! Just make sure to not overshadow your co-teachers, because they're trying just as hard and are aware of things like the time remaining as well.