Practicum Placement

Today’s class was very beneficial because we got to collaborate with our colleagues. Being able to use the curriculum document and create learning objectives was very useful. At my practicum placement, I am also teaching lessons and planning for them. An activity like this is relevant to my practicum placement, but will also help my teaching. For example, when writing your learning goals, I learned you could write “upon completion of this lesson students should be able to”. This is an excellent way to list the learning objectives for the lesson. In today’s class, my memory was refreshed about Blooms Taxonomy, which I learned in both my science and ELL class. However, todays class allowed me to understand it and apply it specifically in math.

I understand that there are key verbs attached to each level. As a teacher, I would have a poster of Blooms Taxonomy in class because it is very useful when creating and planning a lesson plan. I also learned that cognitive load is very important for teachers to understand. As an educator, we must reduce cognitive load. Unfortunately growing up most of my math teachers did not provide this option, however we are given the opportunity to do so. For example, some ways teachers can reduce cognitive load is by proving a guided reading of the question with the class. Providing students with manipulatives e.g. blocks, cubes, numbers lines etc. Teachers can also provide a picture of the word problem is required. The teacher can break the question apart and rephrase it differently without giving away the answer.