Great timing, as I'm beginning Unit 5 of 7th Grade tomorrow! Also, these are the kinds of conversations I wish teachers had scheduled time to be able to have during the work-day. I would love the opportunity to have common planning time with my ms math department to regularly have discussions about these types of seemingly little moves that could ultimately drive significantly higher engagement.
I've been back long term subbing for two different semesters since I stopped full time teaching. There is nothing quite like it in terms of both feeling incredibly familiar and yet elusive at the same time. Glad to see that you are in there *and* that you are taking time to share your process/reflection. Appreciated.
I like the challenge that you'll pick 4 of the most useful sketches. I feel like annotation is a skill that can be developed especially when they can see examples created by their peers in the moment. Most students hate explaining their reasoning in a sentence but are more likely to take up sketching it using some sort of representation. Another reason I love common core, my 2nd grader is subtracting numbers but using a number line to jump to friendly numbers then add up the total of her jumps. No regrouping. I feel that once her and other students who learned this way arrive to middle school to learn integers, they will have a. nice representation to fall back on to build understanding on a tough topic.
Would love to hear more about how you facilitated the final discussion of the 4 student sketches. Any specifics would be great, but here’s an example of what I mean. You said you shared them one at a time. How did you keep it fresh so the last sketch didn’t fall flat as just a repeat of the other 3?
Thanks for linking to the article in Education Week. For some reason, this narrative of "broken children" seems to catch hold of us from time to time. Remember the moral panic over "crack babies" and the predictions of a massive crime wave, collapse of public education, huge rise in the need for social services, etc.? Why do we so easily slip from, "Yes, some children have problems" to "lost generation"? In my darker moments I suspect it's caused by people who want to write off Black and Brown children as bad investments and don't want to spend money addressing the real problems children have, so they'd prefer to make the whole thing sound hopeless.
Great timing, as I'm beginning Unit 5 of 7th Grade tomorrow! Also, these are the kinds of conversations I wish teachers had scheduled time to be able to have during the work-day. I would love the opportunity to have common planning time with my ms math department to regularly have discussions about these types of seemingly little moves that could ultimately drive significantly higher engagement.
I've been back long term subbing for two different semesters since I stopped full time teaching. There is nothing quite like it in terms of both feeling incredibly familiar and yet elusive at the same time. Glad to see that you are in there *and* that you are taking time to share your process/reflection. Appreciated.
I like the challenge that you'll pick 4 of the most useful sketches. I feel like annotation is a skill that can be developed especially when they can see examples created by their peers in the moment. Most students hate explaining their reasoning in a sentence but are more likely to take up sketching it using some sort of representation. Another reason I love common core, my 2nd grader is subtracting numbers but using a number line to jump to friendly numbers then add up the total of her jumps. No regrouping. I feel that once her and other students who learned this way arrive to middle school to learn integers, they will have a. nice representation to fall back on to build understanding on a tough topic.
Would love to hear more about how you facilitated the final discussion of the 4 student sketches. Any specifics would be great, but here’s an example of what I mean. You said you shared them one at a time. How did you keep it fresh so the last sketch didn’t fall flat as just a repeat of the other 3?
Thanks for linking to the article in Education Week. For some reason, this narrative of "broken children" seems to catch hold of us from time to time. Remember the moral panic over "crack babies" and the predictions of a massive crime wave, collapse of public education, huge rise in the need for social services, etc.? Why do we so easily slip from, "Yes, some children have problems" to "lost generation"? In my darker moments I suspect it's caused by people who want to write off Black and Brown children as bad investments and don't want to spend money addressing the real problems children have, so they'd prefer to make the whole thing sound hopeless.