Eunhee Kim

Domain D: Student Learning

As a teacher, the most important aspect of teaching a lesson is

how much students have learned through that lesson. Having every
student in class to learn is challenging because each student is very
different from other students in class in terms of interest, learning
preference, attitude toward the subject and many other factors play
role as well. At the beginning of year, a survey that asks for students
interest, likes, dislikes and concern about math allows teacher to make
connection to materials student find interesting to learning materials.
Also, using students name on word problems helps students to feel as
a part of whole group and also help them focus because their name or
their friends name was mentioned in the word problem that students
might find irrelevant and dull.
The BA/MA adolescent mathematics education program at
Hunter College has provided me with an opportunity to grow
professionally in terms of meeting the students academic needs and
assessing the level of student learning. Through the courses such as
SEDC 210 and student teaching seminar, I learned how to design
lessons such that students will be given with an opportunity to learn at
their best ability and interest. I try to provide a variety of perspective

and methods such that they will have choices in terms of solving a
problem. I want all students to think about what problem is asking and
think of an option that is the most suitable choice when dealing with a
particular situation with a proper justification.
When I am planning a lesson, I think of building blocks. When
building blocks, the most crucial thing is to have a strong and steady
foundation. So I spend a lot of time setting up those elements for
foundation about learning materials as much as possible. I pre-assess
the students understanding of pre-requisite materials informally
through the Do Now exercises because if I give them an assessment to
measure those areas of understanding, students may find it stressful
which effects on activation of their prior knowledge. So what I often do
is to give them a Do Now exercises that is pre-requisite skill for that
days lesson. Through going over those Do Nows, students will be able
to activate their prior knowledge without stress and anxiety affecting
their judgment.
Also, when I think of sequencing the lesson segments, I
purposely arrange them such that previous lesson would frequently
reappear in the following lesson. The first lesson that I did on the slope
was to relating staircases to line. The following lesson was about
negative slope which I used staircases examples again. Once students
have made connection to the steepness of the staircases to the
steepness of a line during the lesson on the positive slope, the

following lesson on negative slope went smoothly. Also, on the

worksheet, finding the slope of a given line or given two sets of
ordered pairs reappears so that students would not forget the lesson
due to lack of repetition.
Also, at the end of lesson # 2, students are given with a quiz that
asks for a justification. I force students to use proper math vocabulary
through their responses and comments both verbally and written
because Common Core focuses on students literacy development as
well as their academic growth in a subject matter. A simple quiz that
asks for phrases that were repeated through the entire lesson would
get students to use math vocabulary and pay attention to use of those
vocabularies during the class discussion and lesson.
The formal assessment of this particular lesson was consists of 3
parts: find the slope of each line, construct a line using two points and
then find the slope of each line, and explain their strategy to find the
slope of a line without using a graph representation.