Collaboration

This quarter has come and gone very fast. It has been super overwhelming but the classes we have taken have been extremely useful. Today was such a productive and eyeopening experiences deconstructing a lesson from our main placement classroom. Instead of having us do this assignment, Alison allowed us to work with one another to collaborate and dissect the lesson that we brought. I really enjoyed this assignment because collaboration is such a large part of teaching and listening to other ideas and thoughts is so enriching. Both my partner and I had taught the lesson we were working with but we taught it differently and because we were able to look at this lesson more closely i was able to learn a couple of great ideas that would be so helpful when teaching my students about multiplication and division. One example of something I took a way from this lesson that my partner did when she taught it is, when gauging for students prior knowledge, the teacher should ask the student what their favorite fact is from the multiple they are learning. This way all students can have access to what they are learning. I also learned where choral counting and quick images can be inserted into the beginning of a lesson or in the middle of a lesson to help students further their understanding and conceptualize different strategies to help them learn the specific mathematical concept they are learning. This was such a great activity to do collaboratively and definitely should be used in other classes for us to be able to really engage with the curriculum we are using and engage with one another.

Confusion

<p>On Wednesday in my main placement I taught a math lesson on formulas for area and perimeter. It was the first time where I struggled with how to help my students progress towards the learning targets because at the end of the lesson I had a few students raise their hands saying they were confused. I didn't understand how they possibly could be confused because I had explained to them the concepts every way I could think of but they were just not getting it. I didn't know what else to do but then I remembered that during our math methods course we talked about how important it is for students to revoice each  others thinking and repeat their classmates thinking is for specific problems questions or formulas.
     I decided to try having students explain the formulas instead of me explaining them. Once I had the students explain the formulas other students started to feel confident and wanted to participate and answer questions and problems on the board. This lesson really helped me to think about the next days lesson would look like because I could assess what my students knew and what they needed to know for the unit assessment.

Talk Moves

I am so happy that I have been able to learn about different ways to elicit conversation between myself and my students and between my students and each other. Since learning about the different math talk questions and ways to phrase questions and when to use certain questions I have really tried to use them in my lessons. For example, I taught a math lesson a few weeks ago and I worked on having the students explain one another's thinking. When a student answered a question about patterns with one of their multiplication facts, I had another student explain their thinking and it was extremely powerful to listen to the students having conversation with another. I also used the revoicing technique during science, when one student was having a hard time explaining his thinking to his group mates. I asked the student if I could try to explain his idea to the group, I revoiced what he was trying to tell them and his group started to understand what he was saying and they felt it was a great idea. 

I think all of the talk moves are extremely powerful techniques that are becoming very useful in my teaching and helping me to elicit student thoughts and understanding during conversation. 

Another technique that has helped me to get more student input, is think time. Giving students an extra 30 seconds to think about the question or problem being asked makes the world of difference for participation. Now that i use think time during my discussions with the students I am getting so much more responses from people do not always share or like to share their reasoning or thoughts. 

Quick Image

This week I tried my hand at leading a quick image with my 3rd graders. I was going to teach 9's multiplication but because we ended up having a snow week, the week before I didn't feel confident teaching it, so I asked to do a quick image instead.My cooperating teacher said, that was fine and that it is hard to teach something when you have not seen any of the other lessons taught before. I felt much better after talking to her because I have noticed that it is extremely hard to teach twice a week and plan a week ahead of time because we don't get to see what happens in the classroom prior to the days we are there. But I know that it is only for a short while and I am very happy to be getting the experience I am teaching the lessons when I can.  I chose to use the quick images that had groups of 2's and 5's because the students had just learned their 2's and 5's multiplication and division. My students really enjoyed the quick image activity and had fun doing them, I followed the steps in order to do a quick image with the class, and I made sure to have a few students explain their thinking, they all talked about grouping the dots and then either adding or multiplying which is exactly how we want them to think about the images.

I am hoping to be able to do another quick image next week when I teach the students a math lesson on multiplying 4's, I will probably use a quick image having the number 9 as part of the multiplier because my students just learned their 9's multiplication, so it will be a great assessment to see if they know their 9's. I am also excited do the quick image activity because they are learning about quick arrays which is basically the quick image itself. The quick image is a fun activity and I can't wait to keep doing them with my math lessons because they work so well.