Discovering Teaching as a Profession

After my first year with my mentorship, I realized that brain teasers and other fun and challenging activities were not being incorporated a lot in lesson plans. Because of this, I wanted to focus my research for this year on brain teasers. I wanted to find a way to encourage teachers at Chestatee Academy to increase their use of problem solving activities.

 

First off, I needed to see how useful brain teasers are in classrooms. Through my annotated bibliographies, I found research and sources that show how brain teasers help students learn material better and make students more passionate about learning. This corresponds to my observations of students last year when I would give brain teaser activities to Mrs. Brooksher's class.

 

Another observation that I noticed during my mentorship is that brain teasers were useful for every type of students.

The brain teasers were effective in Mrs. Brooksher's

accelerated classes, but I was unsure about how

effective they would be regular-leveled students.

Luckily, Mrs. Brooksher taught a small class of kids

who were struggling with all of their classes. These

were the type of students that hated learning and

had little motivation. On a few days, I would bring

in some different Rubix cubes, some of which were

very complex shapes, and many of the students in

that class would spend the whole period trying to solve them. Most of the students were tried to solve the more complex ones first. This shows that brain teasers can even create motivation and passion in students without any.

 

After conducting research and concluding that brain teasers should be a high focus at Chestatee Academy, I tried to encourage the 7th grade math teachers to use them more in class. However, one of the problems with using brain teasers in the classroom is that there is not enough time to give classes brain teasers while also fitting in enough time to teach all of the content. After an interview with Mrs. Brooksher and discussion with her, I presented the teachers with alternate ways to incorporate brain teasers in teaching. I suggested that brain teasers could be used as extra credit homework assignments and that there could be logic activities, board games, and toys that students can play with in class after all of their work is finished. The 7th grade teachers agree with me that brain teasers should be used more at Chestatee Academy, and Mrs. Brooksher is planning to use them more next year.