Merrie Letter

Merrie Blunk
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
610 E. UNIVERSITY AVE., #1600 ANN ARBOR, MI 48109-1259 (734) 615-7632 fax: (734) 615-7441 [email protected]
February 20, 2013 To Whom It May Concern: Michelle Landis was a student in my Teaching Children Mathematics course, EDUC 411 in the fall of 2012. Michelle attended every class with complete attention and an obvious interest in making the most of all the learning opportunities available to her. As an instructor, I knew that I could always count on Michelle to have completed all the assignments and readings and be willing to share her insights as well as questions. I appreciated that Michelle was also willing to get up in front of her peers and try out small pieces of teaching, such as explaining a mathematical idea. It can be intimidating to be singled out in such a way, but Michelle seemed to view such experiences as additional learning opportunities and was always game to try. I was not surprised to find out that Michelle has a 3.9 grade point average in her undergraduate course work; certainly her work in my course was consistently excellent. Excellent grades at a challenging institution like the University of Michigan can only be earned by students who are hardworking, diligent, attend to detail and are very well organized. These characteristics demonstrated by Michelle as a student will serve her well in her teaching profession. As part of the course, Michelle worked on, among other teaching practices, explaining mathematical ideas using accurate and appropriate mathematical language that is geared toward the learner, analyzing student work to uncover student thinking and possible misconceptions, and modeling and representing common algorithms of mathematical operations in ways that make clear the meaning of the steps. One of the major emphases of the course was for the teacher interns to learn how to plan for and lead a whole class mathematics discussion. This is often a difficult goal as many children are not used to listening to their peers and talking about mathematical ideas. However, participating in discussions provides a rich opportunity for students to share ideas and engage in reasoning about and explaining mathematics while using mathematical vocabulary- all important mathematical practices. As part of her course assignments, Michelle lead four whole class mathematics discussions in her 5th grade classroom. In the first two discussions, Michelle was provided with the discussion plan and the mathematical task to be discussed. In the final two discussions, Michelle chose the mathematical task, planned for the discussions, and chose and planned for a brief written assessment of student learning in addition to leading the discussion and implementing the assessment. Michelle also carefully planned for and developed explanations of important mathematical ideas relevant to the content of the discussion. Because Michelle videotaped all her discussions, these activities not only provided Michelle an opportunity to learn and practice important skills in teaching, they also provided me with opportunities to observe and learn about her as a student and as a teacher intern. In the final assignment for the course, Michelle planned and taught a lesson with a mathematical discussion on using equivalent fractions and converting between percents and fractions in reading information in graphs and creating graphs. Her lesson planning showed thoroughness and thoughtfulness with regard to both the students and the mathematics. I remember seeing multiple versions of graphs Michelle was considering in planning for her lesson and
some interesting conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of the various versions. In her extensive lesson plan, Michelle carefully detailed series of questions designed to engage a wide range of the students in her classroom. Her questions included a variety of ways to elicit student ideas, support students in listening to and responding to other students ideas and probes to follow up on important or unclear student responses. While such careful attention to planning for such broad participation from students is one of the goals of our class, Michelles planning exhibits a deeper level of such consideration than is often seen among our teaching interns. In the actual teaching of her lesson, Michelle used a variety of teaching moves to orchestrate the discussion and include a wide range of students in participating productively in the discussion. Another focus of the course was to help students develop a disposition towards reflection on and improving their own teaching. Throughout the semester, Michelle was always very diligent in looking back at her teaching and considering how she might continue to improve her teaching practice. I believe that one of Michelles real strengths is her commitment toward reflecting on and improving her practice a disposition that will provide continued strengthening of her teaching skills. In summary, through my interactions with Michelle, I have found her to be hard working, thoughtful and careful in her planning and instruction and strongly committed to providing learning opportunities to all students in her classroom as well as continual development of her own teaching skills. I believe Michelle to be well positioned to be a new teacher in her own classroom and I strongly recommend her for this position.
Merrie Blunk, PhD Instructor and Researcher

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Merrie Blunk

Merrie Blunk, PhD Instructor and Researcher

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