Standard 4

The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners.

My Interpretation: The teacher has a strong grasp of the key ideas, methods, and structure of the subject they teach, and designs lessons that help students understand and connect with the content in meaningful ways.

Artifact 1: TWS Lesson 3

Indicator: 4 (f) Evaluates and modifies instructional resources and curriculum materials for their comprehensiveness, accuracy for representing particular concepts in the discipline, and appropriateness for his/her learners.

Introduction to Artifact: This is one of the lessons from my teacher work sample. This lesson, in particular, reviewed simplification and finding a least common denominator. While completing the previous lesson in module 4, I noticed the students struggled with simplifying fractions and finding a common denominator between fractions. I decided that the next day we would do a review, which resulted in this lesson.

Rationale: As mentioned in the introduction to this artifact, this is a review lesson since I noticed the students were struggling with these skills. The prior lesson was working with changing decimals to fractions and adding them. To add fractions, the students needed to find common denominators and put their answers in the simplest form. While working through the guided notes and the example problems, I noticed they were really struggling with these skills. Instead of pushing them on, I decided that they needed a review day on least common denominators and simplification. I felt that reviewing these topics would benefit students because they would be skills added to as the module continued. By taking a step back and changing my instruction, it will allow the students to be better able to meet the content standards that accompany this module.

Artifact 2: Online Algebra Tiles

Indicator: 4 (a) Effectively uses multiple representations and explanations that capture key ideas in the discipline, guide learners through learning progressions, and promote each learner’s achievement of content standards.

Introduction to Artifact: Polypad is an online algebra tile website. It has many other functions, but for my class, I use it for the algebra tile function. The problem I am representing here was part of the guided notes I created for lesson 5.2: adding algebraic expressions.

Rationale: When teaching a new concept to my students, I like to give them multiple representations of the same problem. One way to solve the problem is to use just the numbers, and another way is to use visual manipulatives. These may not be handheld manipulatives, but they work the same as handheld algebra tiles. This gives the students a visible representation of how to add 4x - 2 and -7x - 3. It shows them that combining negative and positive x's will cancel out and reach zero. What's left after the x's and constants have combined is the answer. After showing them how to use algebra tiles to complete the problem, I walk through the mathematical steps. This way, the students get both options and can use whichever makes the most sense. By showing multiple representations of one problem, it will allow the students to choose the method that will be the most successful for them and allow them the full potential to achieve the content standards.