MIAA 360: Designing Mathematics Instruction

Final Reflection
Sub-question: What effect will having a well-designed unit have on students
understanding?
This course required me to take everything that we had learned all year and apply it to
analyzing curriculum, conducting lesson studies, writing project based learning units, and
creating a professional development day.
The IMP unit Shadows is an example of a well-designed unit and is an exemplar of what I
should look for in the math curriculum that I provide.
The lesson study showed how a well-crafted lesson has specific questions designed to
help students explore and discover concepts for themselves. Further questions and discussions
help them connect what they are learning into a meaningful pattern. Even with a very detailed
plan, as the lesson progressed, I needed to be flexible enough to go where the students went and
provide clearer questions and prompts to bring them towards the conclusion that they needed to
see. As I applied that to the next group I taught, I applied my more refined plan. Yet, since it was
a different group of children, I had to flex and bend in yet another direction. Even though the
lesson constantly evolved from the original plan, the time spent planning and thinking it through
enabled me to give the students more of an exploratory type lesson and helped me guide the
lesson towards the desired outcome. I will need to continue the practice of looking at lessons
through this lens so that I can prepare for them for them more efficiently.
Planning professional development required me to think critically about my experiences.
My goal was to plan a day that was both engaging and useful for the classroom teacher. I chose
to highlight how to integrate childrens literature and math. I have found that students both enjoy
and learn from such experiences.

The project based learning units were challenging to create. I found that the first one took
me an inordinate amount of time. I spun in several directions before I settled on a course I was
comfortable with. The end product was dense and thorough with an overall summary and weekly
plans. As I was writing the second unit, I was much more proficient in locating standards and
zeroing in on actual lessons.
Since I ran out of school year in which to teach the PBL, I dont have actual data of the
effect this would have on students learning. Yet from similar experiences of teaching integrated
projects, I know students will do better when concepts are connected and relate to a bigger idea.
The next step will be to apply what I have learned to create more PBLs during the STEM
class that Im participating in this summer. I feel that I now know the components of a PBL and
have begun to develop a process of how to efficiently construct one.
This course was demanding both in time and complexity. I felt it helped me synthesize
what I had learned this year about discourse, assessment, equity, instruction, and content.