To teach, we must continue to learn
- Cheryl Madliger
- Jan 31, 2017
- 2 min read
This post is a reflection I wrote for Math + Code Zine after visiting a grade 4/5 classroom with two of my fellow teacher candidates from Western. You can find the teaching materials we found in the teaching section of this site, and my original post, along with my classmates' reflections, in Math + Code Zine.
As part of the new two-year format of teachers’ college in Ontario, current teacher candidates not only specialize in their teachable subjects, but also add a cohort specialty to their list of qualifications. As part of the STEM specialty, I have frequently been told that I am gaining knowledge in an area that is becoming increasingly important in today’s schools. As part of a visit to a Grade 4/5 classroom, along with two of my fellow teacher candidates, we used Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) to incorporate coding into a Math lesson. I saw my newfound skill-set in use and realized that as graduating young teachers, we will bring valuable skills to classrooms that other teachers might not have had the opportunity to learn yet. My classmates and I felt as though we could have taught the class so many other concepts through coding and had hoped to get through a lot more, including the incorporation of the use of the Sphero, a robotic toy that can be programmed using block-based coding similar to that used in Scratch. The classroom teacher thanked us for coming in and even invited us back to do more work with the students! At one point, he commented on how we were bringing something to the kids that he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Being a part of the STEM cohort has stretched me as an educator. I spent the last seven years of my life in Kinesiology programs and while I can say that there is a Masters degree on my wall, I cannot say that I’ve ever learned a thing to do with coding or computational thinking before enrolling in teachers’ college. What has come from my experiences, is we ought to embrace these opportunities
to develop our skills to match the needs of today’s students. Ten years ago, when I was in high school, we lived in a different world—there were no smartphones or tablets in students’ hands, I had never seen a SmartBoard, and I certainly didn’t think I would be learning computer programming any time in my future. The rate of change thanks to technology is rapid, and seems to show no signs of slowing down. Although it can be difficult to keep up, I’ve learned that it is so important to work together as teachers—as we did, by bringing our lesson to that Grade 4/5 classroom and sharing our ideas with a teacher who will be able to use it in his own lesson plans in the future—so that the needs of the students are kept at the forefront of our teaching.
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