Assignment #3, March 27, Research of the topic "writing to learn math" :Matthew Hallahan

Writing to Learn Math, by Joan Countryman

So the book I read was specifically designed to guide math teachers. Many of the strategies can be applied to all subject areas but some of the most helpful ideas were strictly math ideas.

It begins by analyzing why writing is important in the math curriculum. Essentially we must move away from thinking of math as simply a set of skills that must be learned. Math is the using of these skills to analyze the world. Too much time is spent in math classes passively learning or churning out answers to equations. We must get students to spend more time justifying, representing, discussing, predicting, and just being active. This can be done using a few of the suggestions in the book

The first suggestion is to get students to journal write or write about their thoughts on math. Students often have a difficult time writing about math because they have never had to do it before. So it can be a good idea to give them a prompt to begin writing about. For example
-What problems did you find difficult on the exam and why?
-I think calculators....
-Teachers usually say...

The purpose is to get students thinking about their math experiences. One suggestion I really liked about journal writing, was that it is very important for the teacher to keep a journal for himself/herself. How can you really get across the importance and helpfulness of a journal if you yourself don't use one? So keep a journal of how your lessons go. And share a few entries with your students. It will show them how much you care about your job, and model how they might go about the task of their own journals. Adding a table of contents, introduction, and closing can give the journal added importance.

Another suggestion is to have students keep Learning Logs. In a learning log, a student basically creates a portfolio of math problems that they have learned how to do. They explain in words how they went about solving the problems, or talk about the difficulties they had in learning how to do them.

The last suggestion that I will discuss is the use of open ended questions to stimulate analysis. Students are given questions that involve exploration. One example is "how many squares are on a checkerboard?" The students, in groups, explore the question, ask pertinent question, and record their results. There is a rough draft. And there is a final draft. The final draft should be neat and include diagrams and/or examples.

The two of these that I really like are the open ended question and the Learning Log. I've done the open ended questions thing where they must write about their thought process. I haven't had too much success though. I haven't been able to get across what I want. They can tell me how they got an answer sometimes, but when they go to write it down they wont write the process, just the answer. Maybe i just need to do it more often instead of every once in a while like currently.
The learning log also seems like a great idea but its also a really big project and I'm afraid that I'll start it and not follow through.

Overall, this was a decent book. My biggest complaint was that it was obviously written by a teacher who has only had experience in very privileged wealthy schools.