Reflect after you have planned a task for your THINKING classroom:
Give it a try! Plan a lesson that includes some of the strategies you have learned in this book. What will you include that will provide your students with a rich math experience in your thinking classroom?
Consider the following questions:
- What strategies did you include?
- What are you anticipating?
- How might you need to spontaneously differentiate?
- HOW DID IT GO? 🤠
Respond and Interact
After planning and facilitating a lesson for your THINKING classroom, please post your response to one {or more} of the prompts above. Read our colleagues' reflections. Feel free to respond to someone by sharing a comment, insight or interesting possibility.
Okay - We've tried a few of the strategies and mixed it between math and ELA. We've been using random partnering, which we love! We have seen much higher engagement and higher quality of work. At first, our transition times were eating up too much learning time, but we have come up with a system to switch partners without much time spent and therefore we can switch them several times in a lesson. We are also using vertical spaces. We do love this strategy and use it often in math, so thank you for sending more vertical spaces that we can utilize.
ReplyDeleteThe strategy that I decided to implement in ELA was taking useful notes "for your future forgetful self". I thought this was a perfect skill to teach our 5th graders, as they are about to enter middle school. We did our first two lessons in poetry with this strategy and let's just say, it was a minor disaster. This is a hard skill for them because they are used to having things hand fed to them for their reader's notebook. However, I learned a lot and have some ideas of how to scaffold it a bit better to baby step our way into being more independent thinkers and engaged note takers. We'll be focusing on this for the remainder of the year. :)
There are so many things I want to try. Number one, I am going to try using vertical surfaces with my students this year. I also want to try having my students stand when going around and looking at student work. I want to see if the level of engagement increases, one of the times my students disengage the most during math is when seated for the synthesis.
ReplyDeleteI want to recreate the different thinking task ideas at the end of each chapter to begin with next year. I am also considering having my students try them this year. We have used thinking tasks but not this type. I am excited to see how they react to such open-ended tasks while completing them using a vertical surface.
I wanted to try using vertical surfaces before submitting this response but haven't gotten to it yet! I did get my wipe books though and am planning to use them for the first time tomorrow (yay!). Something that I did do this week was create a rubric using what we learned from chapter 12 and it was really successful. I used the 2 columns, pared down the language, my visuals could have been better, and the arrow across the top. It was so accessible for my first graders and therefore effective!
ReplyDeleteThank you all for carving out the time for this book study. I know how busy life is and your commitment and enthusiasm to continue learning is inspiring. Feeling grateful! 🧡
ReplyDeleteI have been using random groups for math almost everyday for the last couple of weeks, which has been so great for getting students to learn how to work with other people. Plus, they get to work with their friends sometimes and don't argue with the groups because they see it is random. I love it and will continue to use this.
ReplyDeleteI have also used the wipebooks to add more vertical surfaces in my room and have been able to make 9 spaces for students to write on so that I can have no more than 3 students in a group. This has made an astronomical difference in how my students engage with math. They are collaborating, they are using other's ideas to help themselves if they get stuck, and are almost begging me to share their thinking.
I had to create the expectation that everyone in the group needs to understand and be okay with what goes on the boards and that helped move things along. I am so excited to make my Wipebooks more sturdy and get the old projector out of my room to make sure I have enough writing surfaces to keep this going.
I am still trying to figure out how to make everything flow and what to do to get students to keep going when they are finished with a task. I am getting better at it and it is getting easier as it goes on.
I will definitely be relistening to this book prior to the start of the school year and may need to use some of my Activities money to get my own copy of the book so I can make bookmarks. 😄