Group Microteaching Reflection

 On the whole, I think that our presentation went very smoothly. Obviously, having a group of students already familiar with the material means that we could cover ground faster than we would in a real Grade 11 classroom, so I'm not certain if our pacing was suitable, but otherwise I thought that our use of examples and connection to real life was appropriate and engaging.

I was especially pleased with how well it was received when we asked students to brainstorm constraints on the optimization. This is, in my opinion, the key mathematical skill of optimization, so I was glad to see that the lesson clearly encouraged the behaviour. The act of creating an optimization function is also important, but it is a mechanical enough operation that I was never concerned that students would struggle greatly with it. Without calculus, optimization is really just a relatively simple exercise in algebra.

I found this topic very interesting to discuss and to think about teaching because I don't recall discussing it in my own high school experience until the very end of high school in Calculus 12. That makes some sense, since I know the curriculum has changed quite a bit, but I really like the idea of introducing basic optimization principles earlier, since it is a clear use of mathematics for decision-making, something we often gesture towards in our justifications for curriculum but students are sometimes unconvinced by.