My Inquiry Project Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1roY4vRCNx9tNYrPfTFQDUasNYXjJJT_ThpRFyB9sLfg/edit?usp=sharing
I enjoyed the inquiry project a lot. I thought that it helped me reflect on assessment practices as a teacher. It allowed me to examine what assessment practices work and what not and how to engage students through effective assessment. The project also allowed me to reflect on my past experiences, both good and bad, as a student and a teacher. As a result, I am able to pick out the positive aspects I have seen teachers implement in the past, while shunning the negative ones.
In my inquiry project, I forgot to incorperate the connections to the real world aspect. I had a conversation with Kevin, our 441 instructor, about cheating and student motivation behind it. He mentioned that as a teacher, it is important to remove the mindset of marks that students often think about. He said that when students focus on learning, they are often more engaged and perform better on assessments. To get student mindset off of marks, he uses proficiency scales instead of letter grades or percentages. By removing the "mark" on a test and telling students the areas they need to improve on instead, their focus immediately switches from fishing for marks to "how can I improve and best learn the material." I thought that this was very insightful and something I can take away for my future classroom.
Overall, I thought that the course content could have been more applicable and related to the inquiry projects. I am finding it hard to understand the practicality of rope-making and braiding in high school secondary mathematics without it looking extremely forced into the curriculum. Similarly, the blog post about climate change felt as if I had to force word problems about climate change into my homework and tests. Climate change would be applicable in a statistics class, but not so much for other classes. Lastly, I disliked the Alfie Kohn video and thought that it was very biased. I felt like he only addressed the positive aspects of cooperative learning without addressing the downsides. As a person who enjoys competitive learning and activities, I felt attacked. All in all, I appreciated the work periods given for the inquiry project and thought that the inquiry projects were the highlights of the class, but with this being our inquiry class, I am finding it hard to see the relevance of the rest of the class content to the inquiry project.