Strategies and Methods of Teaching

     During our ten-lesson unit plan, my partner and I tried to use different types of teaching strategies, instructional methods, and techniques in order to help our students learn trigonometry in many different ways.  Our plans reflected our goals and values of allowing students to become as actively involved in their learning as possible.

     Over the course of our lessons, we made every effort to allow our students to work together in pairs or groups as much as possible.  We utilized methods such as think-pair-share[1] when we had students do reinforcement problems at their desks.  We, as the teachers, would model the correct procedures of a problem to the class, and then have them try another problem on their own.  When they were done, we would ask them to talk with their partner sitting next to them, and then talk with their group of four.  We would then examine the solution to the problem as an entire class.

     In other lessons, we utilized more complicated cooperative learning strategies, such as the jigsaw method[2], in order to allow students to view the entire assignment without having to do all of the tedious calculations that would be necessary if each student did every problem.  This strategy worked particularly well in two of our lessons.  During a problem solving activity in the very beginning of the unit, different groups of students were responsible for graphing different trigonometric functions in order to determine how amplitude and period affect the graph.  They then compared their findings to come up with a rule for the relationship between the equation of a function and its graph. 

     Both of these methods, the jigsaw and the think-pair-share method worked well with these students.  They did well with the think-pair-share method because they did not always have the background knowledge to answer the problems completely, but when they tried on their own and then worked in partners and groups they were better able to find the solutions to the problems.   With the jigsaw method, students were able to do a quarter of the work necessary to understand a particular idea, and still get the information.  They were able to work together in order to gain an understanding of the material as a class.

     Along with varying our strategies, we also varied our instructional activities and our techniques.  Our most commonly used method involved having the students practice what they know and what they’ve learned by doing a few problems on a worksheet or off of the blackboard.  During other lessons, we used instructional activities and techniques such as computers, puzzles, games, and projects.  These lessons allowed our students to get a different perspective on the trigonometry unit that they were learning.  The students really seemed to like these activities, especially the computer lesson and the trigonometric identity puzzle.

     Both of these activities allowed the students to be actively involved in their learning, to experiment on their own, to work alone or in groups, and to be responsible for themselves.  Both activities were well structured in order to support the students, but flexible enough to allow the student to explore what they were not as comfortable with.  With the computer lesson, they were able to manipulate equations of different trigonometric functions and look at the resulting graph in order to determine a pattern.  With the puzzle activity, students put together small squares in order to create a larger four by four square where touching sides were mathematically equivalent.  These activities were well received by our students, and the activities seemed to reinforce the knowledge that we were trying to teach them.

     All of our lessons and activities were designed in order to reinforce our goals for our class.  These methods allowed our students to learn and do work on their own while being supported by my partner and I as their teachers.  When our students were allowed to work together on these types of activities, they seemed to understand what was going on in our lessons.  There were other times when they seemed somewhat confused by the topic that they were learning, but this was generally alleviated by problem solving activities that allowed the students to work together.  In the end, many of the students were able to understand the material well enough to satisfy them.  They are able to work with inverse functions, to graph trigonometric equations, and to simplify trigonometric expressions.