Pedegogy

The pedagogy being used in the fifth grade classroom is much different then the pedagogy being used in the middle school classroom. The fifth grade classroom used more hands on techniques that aided to a better foundation and knowledge to accomplish the learning goal then the middle school classroom. To begin with, the fifth grade classroom used mirrors. This helped the students come up with various polygons to explore if they could be tessellated or not. The middle school classroom teacher simply told the students which shapes could be tessellated. I understand that the objective of the middle school class was to understand what tessellation means and not know the shapes that could tessellate, but giving the students the three shapes only hindered their understanding. Using the hands on materials that the elementary school students were given, aloud them to draw their own conclusions and be able to relate the things their teacher was saying with material objects that they could see. The elementary school students were also given polygons to understand that in order for shapes to tessellate, the shapes around the center point could not overlap. By making this discovering through actually drawing their own shapes seemed to work more effective then giving the students an entire bucket shapes as the middle school teacher did.

I feel that the major difference in teacher styles was the questions that the teachers asked their students. The fifth grade teacher asked questions that made the students think and draw their own conclusions. On the other hand, the middle school teacher asked questions that I feel did not direct his students as close to the learning goal as he could have, if he would have wordered his question better or ask it in a different way. While I understand what he implies in many of his questions, I feel as if the students do not understand the importance of his questions. For example from 17:57 until 19:13 the middle school teacher asks, "Which of your shapes do you have in the bag that have equal sides and equal angles?" One of the student's answers with the shape square and the teacher goes ahead and tells the class that that is an allowable use of one of those blocks. Two other students raise their hands and add the shapes triangle and hexagon. Through the question that the teacher asked, the students knew that these shapes have equal sides and angles, and knew these were the only shapes they were aloud to use to