Educators contribute to the profession.
Throughout the EDUC 490 practicum, I shared my creativity and knowledge of games with my coaching teacher (CT). I introduced my CT to many new games and ideas that could be implemented in a math 8 classroom to reinforce understanding of various topics. When I was teaching students about measures of central tendency, I shared a card game with the goal of determining whether finding the mean, median, or mode would give students the higher score.
When I taught the students probability, I introduced an Indigenous stick game called Chekutnak. It is a game of chance where the more sticks that land face up, the more points the player gets. This game is a demonstration of contributing to the math resources at my school, while also incorporating Indigenous perspectives and knowledge in a genuine way.
http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/RR/database/RR.09.00/treptau1/game3.html
During our review at the beginning of quarter 2, I covered the concept of factors, prime numbers, and prime factorization. I used the boardgame “Prime Climb” as a resource to create my own version of the game to play in class. I developed the game in a way that used student work as the game board which helped reinforce student understanding of factors and prime numbers. I shared the original and personalized versions of this game with my CT to use in future lessons discussing prime numbers.
Sharing games and resources with my CT was a way, throughout my practicum, that I could contribute to the profession. There were limited opportunities to get together with other educators due to the COVID restrictions, so I shared the resources I had with the educators I was closest with. In future practicum, I hope to be able to contribute more. Sharing ideas and resources with fellow educators is incredibly valuable and something we should always be continuing to do.