Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Minds on Math: Chapter 5 "Discourse"

Problem of the Day:  Why ought and how can teachers facilitate learners engagement in purposeful and meaningful conversations about their thinking?

Great question!  I totally cringed while reading the dialog  piece Hoffer writes about on page 68-69.  I have heard those exact snippets in my room and just couldn't figure out how to stop it!  

Last summer I learned about the "flipped classroom", layered curriculum, and interactive notebooks.  So I recorded a bunch of lessons, created menus of activities and planned out the notebooks.  My vision for my class would be that they watch the video and start their notes for homework, then the first 10 minutes of class would be small group discussion before moving on to the activities.  Things started off okay, but did eventually break down over the course of the year and after reading this chapter I feel that it was because I never taught them how to have those discussions.  I fell into the trap of "if you put them in a group and tell them to talk about math...they will!"  Nooooooo preteens-teenagers do not work that way!

Again, this is another chapter I am going to wear the crap out of while lesson planning!  Not only does Hoffer give detailed outlines for scaffolding and structures (p.80), she also explains how to keep students accountable and how to observe them in their discussions!

2 comments:

  1. I am very interested in hearing more about how you will incorporate your flipped teaching into workshop model. I've seen other teachers do flipped learning, but the videos were strictly skill based. How do you get the deep conceptual understanding with a video? I'd love to hear more about this.

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  2. Sherrie, I started typing a response but it was turning into a looooong one so I figured I'd just go ahead and make a blog post about it!

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