Our third week of school has just come to a close. It was a very busy week. Among other things...we officially started our first unit (make that topic) in Math. I spent a lot of the week trying to get the students used to the flow of the lesson...which includes taking several moments to stop and writing about what is happening/happened.We start with reading the “I can...” statement...a sentence that projects what the students should be able to do by the end of the lesson. I try to get a student to paraphrase the sentence to see if they actually know what it means. I use this moment to clarify any misconceptions before moving on.Next...the students attempt to solve a problem on their own using strategies they already know. Upon completion I let 2 or 3 students share their strategies so the rest of the group sees that there is more than one way to solve the problem.Then I go into my mini-lesson...a quick (no more than 10 minute) lesson that hits the concept and or skill for the day. There are videos I use to accompany this portion of the lesson flow.Next we work on Guided Practice problems. I do a few and ask if there are questions then we do a few more together. At this point I ask the students to do a “quick write” (90 seconds to 3 minutes) capturing the steps involved to solve one of the problems we just did together. The students share this writing with a partner and then I have a few students share whole group.From here we go into the Independent Practice portion...students work on problems on their own while I monitor/assist. At this point I ask the students to do some kind of reflective writing about the lesson as a whole.One way I do this is to have them write what I call a 3-2-1. 3=things they learned, 2=things they thought were interesting or liked about the lesson, 1=a question they have. I’m really interested in how this writing impacts their perception of themselves as “mathematical thinkers” so staring this week I decided I would collect some data. That data is in the form of a sample of each student’s writing. I do this by taking pictures of their notebook entry. I put the entries into Google Drive in a folder using their first name as the “name” of the picture. I take 5 different samples a day. After I’ve taught them how to write a few different types of reflections I’m going to ask them to write about how they think the reflective writing is helping them learn how to think mathematically.
The image above is interesting in that this student coded her own thinking to help her better understand what she was writing about.