TWS Task 6 Deborah L. Ford 201833

Reflections on Capstone Project

Successful student performance

This group of students was most successful on Goal #1—Students will use formulas to represent the area of geometric two-dimension figures.

I believe that they were more successful with this goal because it was pure application of the formulae, no extrapolation or manipulation. The group has great difficulty with higher order thinking skills and this goal did not require any analysis, synthesis or evaluative thinking skills.

Second, I began many lessons addressing their concerns and requests for review. I feel like this fostered a mutual respect between us; they were more willing to attempt any task I assigned. I adjusted my teaching style with diverse activities to help them cement the concepts, and I think it worked in spite of the level of apathy this class had. This group of students had the greatest level of apathy that I had ever encountered in 25 years in the classroom. (I teach Special Education daily, and never have any of my classes been as apathetic as this group.) To help alleviate some of the apathy, I used manipulative activities. These types of activities usually help cement learning to the concepts, and from the post-assessment scores, it must have helped.

I chose this goal to address because it is one of the most commonly used after high school. Everybody uses area—people remodeling their home, bricklayers, gardeners, pavers, city officials, civil servants and on and on. I believe they were greatly successful with this goal because I was able to apply these formulae to everyday situations and help them see why they need to learn these concepts. On the assessments, the problems that were straight forward, no manipulation necessary were the problems the students completed first. Then they moved on to the more complex problems.