Opps! I don’t know how to ask questions!

Yes I ask my students questions but apparently I do it wrong.  I try to engage the class through questioning but of course it is always the same minority that volunteers to answer my questions.  How do I engage everyone.  My questions don’t really elicit learning; they tend to be questions that have a pat answer (“what is 8 squared?”).  I actually avoid students who have requested that I not call on them (most of whom are doing well in the class).  I was at a Seattle School District seminar when I learned how woefully adequate my questioning was, on more counts than I have enumerated here.  So for now my solution is to check out the book “Quality Questioning” from the UW and see how I can improve my questioning skills.  More later.

Slowing down students who rush through worksheets.

When I hand out a worksheet which I want to work through step by step  I often have to cope with the majority of students just working their way through it as quickly as possible.  I lose control of the class and when I want to consider a detail on the sheet it can be like herding cats to get everyone to focus on that aspect of the worksheet.  A solution that another teacher uses is to remove specific numbers from the worksheet and simply feed numbers to the students as the problems come up.  Now I just have to effectively structure the time around which I now have the students’ attention.

First Class Blues

I had never realized that by being the first class a teacher teaches in a particular subject on a particular day is a handicap.  It certainly is for students I teach.  First period are my guinea pigs.   By my third run through a class I and the lesson are practiced and better.  How can this handicap be mitigated?  I had an idea for a solution which seemed fair.  What if you staggered your classes and at some point in October had your first class engage in some reasonable activity, different from the other two, that put them a day behind the pacing of the lessons?  This shouldn’t create more work: it is still three classes just out of order.  Now the first class of the day, third to receive the lesson, gets the benefits of all your mistakes you learned from in your other classes.  If you regularly inserted a single day’s activity that changed the order in which the classes received a given lesson all your classes would evenly experience the same handicap but would also benefit equally.

Assesment ah ha.

PPA 4D says: “The plan includes opportunities for students to engage in a variety of assessments that measure their performance relative to the learning targets”.  I was not sure how, other than an exit slip, to offer a variety of assessments.  One option that was offered to me included having students have small white boards at their desks so that I can ask a question, get them to write an answer and hold up the white boards for me to assess their understanding.  I am planning a trip to Home Depot to buy a special kind of melamine board to cut in pieces, tie markers to and launch the white board assessment adventure in our classroom.The irony is I was familiar idea I just hadn't considered it a form of assessment.

Disater lesson

Today I taught a lesson that was a total disaster.  I had my lesson plan and I knew all the standards I was going to teach to and I knew my objective and how I was going to assess it.  What I didn’t have that I needed was a script.  What I really needed was a 15 minute script explaining functions and function notation.  It was a meandering, disjointed ramble.  I had the key points I wanted to hit on my plan in  outline form but apparently it was too vague. It only took my CT a few minutes to make constructive criticism that allowed me a period of another subject to write a detailed script and saved the following two classes from my disaster.  I am going to always cue myself to consider a script especially for something new like function notation.

High leverage teaching moves meet the PPA.

This week two questions I had seemed to answer themselves.  The first was how to apply Seattle school district’s High Leverage Teaching Move number 3: Use of vocabulary.  The second was how to apply PPA 1E; when being observed during a lesson a candidate wants to be sure their lesson plan’s “learning targets are grounded in transformative multicultural knowledge, reasoning, performance skills, products, or dispositions.”  How do we accomplish this in math classes?  Trying to implement the Seattle School District call to provide students content and process terms daily is one way this PPA can be satisfied.  It is really important that in math vocabulary is used correctly.  For example slope is slope and teachers need to be sure their students are familiar with and fluent with this term.  This is not going to be as easy for someone whose native tongue is not English.  While English speaking students can to a certain degree intuit what slope is in graphic representations, non English speakers will find it difficult.   We need to make sure we take steps to make words like these clear to non English speakers.  This is a high leverage teaching move that begins to satisfy PPA 1E.