Last year when I was teaching second grade, I believe I taught what would be considered a “typical” elementary classroom. I had 23 second grade students. Three of my students were identified with 504 plans for ADHD. One had an IEP for special education and three for speech and language services. Eight of my students were English Language Learners, one had an IQ in the low 80’s and 6 were reading beyond 3rd Grade level. Recently I came across the following quote in the book What Successful Math Teachers Do, Grades Pre-K- 5: Research Based Strategies for Standards-Based Classrooms by Edward S. Wall and Alfred Posamennier.
“Although a teacher may be tempted to have all children begin with the most efficient computational strategy, all children do not come into the classroom with the same skills and prior understanding. Children need opportunities to build on their own understandings and to publicly compare and contrast their strategies and those of their peers.”
The author was talking about this in regards to the teacher simply showing students strategies to solve problems rather then creating opportunities for students to construct their own strategies as they work towards solutions to problem solving tasks and then present their thinking to the class. I’ve used the idea expressed in this quote as the foundation for deciding which students I’d ask to share their thinking and in what order. When studenst are engaged in working through a task, I circulate around the room looking at student work and asking students to justify and explain what they are thinking. As I walk around, I hand out stickies to students with a number written on them letting them know the order I am going to ask them to present. Sequentially, I look for students who have elements that are on the right track and represent the thinking of those students who are still on a concrete level of understanding. Then I progress through the continuum. The final student presenting will represent those who are working at a more complex or abstract level of thought.
But their are other organizational strategies that can be considered. Recently, I attended a session by Jo Boaler at the NCTM Regional Conference in Boston, MA. During this sesson I watched a video clip of students engaged in solving a task. After working privately for a very short time, the teacher stopped the group and asked a student to present his thinking so far and then raise any questions he still had. There was not time for any students to work through to the solution. What ensued was a very lively discussion by the group with other students coming up to respond to the first student and demonstrate their own thoughts and strategies as the whole group worked together to come up with a communal solutiion.
Part of the craft of teaching is to make these kinds of instructional decisions such as how to structure the sharing out afterwards. The following is a list of a few possible ways to organize how the discourse around solutions will occur:
• Pair student work that contains common misconceptions with work containing correct solutions to bring out in discussion the similarities, differences, and contradictions.
• Present work with communication gaps to get student questions and feedback that will help clarify and fill in the gaps.
• If a problem lends itself to using a variety of math manipulatives, drawings, math tools, etc., the presentations could be focused on showing the variety of representations.
• Select students who represent the most common way the class chose to solve a task and then proceed through the continuum to the least common.
• Havie a student present a divergent way of thinking about a problem to broaden the group’s thinking.
• Have the whole class display their work on a table, in the hallway, or hung on the classroom walls and have the class do a gallery walk in random order to view all the work. Students record their questions and comments on sticky notes.
The key here is to use the student presentations to deepen the collective understanding of the core mathematics presented in the lesson. Gail Gerdeman of OSU’s Scientists and Teachers in Education Partnerships (STEPs) Program has designed a handout called a “Student Response Planning Tool” that talks about this subject in more depth. She
has also created a Sharing Template sheet that helps teachers record their plan for student presentations. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic or any other suggestions you may have regarding how to organize student presentations.
Click on the Teacher to Teacher link in the Blog Roll at the right to go to the Teacher to Teacher website. Currently there’s a great newsletter posted that shares more about Jo Boaler’s research.