Aritz Cardenas

Dr. Dennis Parker

MIAA 350
Spring 2014

Final Reflection for MIAA 350 (Mathematical Instruction)
What type of cognitive strategies and tasks can I incorporate into my lesson design
that will allow my students to demonstrate an understanding of concepts, skills, and theories
in the field of mathematics?

I was able to learn a number of cognitive strategies and tasks from this
mathematical instruction course.
Through note taking and demonstration, there were a number of new knowledge,
theories, concepts and tasks I was able to understand and later demonstrate in my practice.
In this course, we went over a variety of content that is essential for instruction; The
content information includes the following: Numbers and numeration, integers, fractions,
Addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, number theory, algebra, and units of
measurement. With these units, a few cognitive strategies and tasks stood out for me. One
simple, yet high effective, strategy has students using manipulatives. Having students
attempting to solve problems using blocks or tiles is a great strategy; students can solve
problems and create formulas without the teacher having to be as specific as possible.
Manipulatives allows for students to discover on their own, which allow for freedom to
solve a problem. This allows for higher retention of concepts and ideas that are learned in
class.
I was able to discover cognitive strategies and tasks through scholarly reading.
During this course, I was able to read a scholarly article titled, A Skyscraping Feat by
Sarah A. Roberts and Jean S. Lee. In this article, the authors state that learning is
maximized when there is sustained use of high cognitive demanding tasks through
instruction. Roberts and Lee claim that in order to maximize student learning, teachers
need to prepare to facilitate student learning, not simply giving challenging problems
(Roberts and Lee, 258 & 260, 2013). The authors use the problem of determining how
many skyscraping windows one would need to clean and the cost associated with it. The
beauty of this problem is that the facilitator does not tell students how to solve it, rather
allow them to solve it themselves. Roberts and Lee show how there are at least 6 different
ways of solving this problem (and they demonstrate it in the article). The authors also give
good strategies on how to successfully facilitate complete, high-cognitive tasks; some
strategies include aligning them to standards/objectives, being prepared for possible
questions asked by students (which can help for differentiation and checking in), allowing
students individual time before group collaboration, and concluding with an entire class
debrief (Roberts and Lee, 260, 2013). I felt this article was very well written, clear and
concise. What I liked about this article is that the authors provided specific prompts that a
teacher can pose to its students for each strategy. Each pathway had between 3 to 5
prompts that a teacher could ask.
Another major component on this mathematical instruction class is that we were
required to reflect on four different occasions. We needed to reflect on the instruction that
we do on our own math classes or those of our colleagues. Although I do not teach
mathematics, I was able to use one of my reflections on a history lesson in which I utilized
statistics and data. The other reflections were based on observations and interviews with
teachers from the three grade spans. My goal for these observations (and interviews) was
to determine what cognitive strategies and tasks were teachers using in their classes to
promote higher learning. One common pattern was that I felt like I was able to apply some
of the information that I learned from the class into the lessons that I was observing. For
example, one teacher was going to teach her class how to complete the square in algebra.
She was explaining what that was and what she was having her students solve (when given
only x
2
+ bx). Students need to solve for the perfect square trinomial. As she was showing
me how she solves it though algebra, I thought how one can use algebraic manipulatives to
help solve the issue. She told me that she has used manipulatives in the past and does plan
on using in her class this year. I think that as professionals, If we can increase our
observing and collaboration of each other, we can learn so much more from one another.