The Smith, Bill, and Hughes article reminded me of one we read towards the beginning of the semester called Mathematical Tasks by Smith and Stein. This article was about creating open ended tasks that use a high level of thinking. Mathematical Tasks emphasizes the importance of task choice and the type of thinking that a certain task invokes. It is very important to know what you want students to get out of a lesson before implementing it. More so, tasks need to be set up in a way that encourages a high level of thinking and involvement in the task. Thinking Through a Lesson also discusses this but relates it to collaborative planning, much like we are doing for our math lessons. When discussing collaborative lesson planning, the article points out that teachers can better anticipate student responses and can generate questions that will promote student learning before actually teaching the lesson. Having input from 4 teachers is certainly more helpful than just your own.
The list of questions from Developing Mathematical Thinking from Effective Questions, will be very helpful for our lesson study planning. Thinking of these questions before teaching the lesson will be important in order to gage how students will be responding throughout the lesson, and guide what we would like them to take from the lesson.
After reading Sarah's post, I am a firm believer that the more involvement for the lesson planning the better. When it comes to looking at how to relate this towards our own work, I feel that having the extra outlook from two other classmates in my group will better help me prepare for the lesson that I, myself will be teaching. When thinking about task choices, my group and myself needs to be considerate of open ended questions and tasks for the students to grasp onto during the lesson. I feel that just as Sarah and the article states, we will better prepare for the responses that we will most likely be receiving based on our planning and open ended tasks. When it comes to planning for our lesson, I feel that my role is going to be a little bit different than that of my other two group members. I feel this way because I will be bringing to the table a more personal level and understanding of responses that will most likely be generated based on what I ask because it I will be teaching the lesson in m classroom with the student I work with every week. Getting feedback and projected information from the other members will not only hit on their own experiences, but experiences from their classroom at different grade levels. I feel that collaborative teaching and planning for this lesson planning study is a great idea and the articles along with Sarah hit on many key points.
ReplyDeleteJust as my colleagues said before me, I also believe that collaboration can be an amazing tool for use in teaching. Although, I do have a few concerns. I do have some concerns. I believe that sometimes when too many people are involved the goal of the project can be lost and everyone's own agenda becomes the competition. This is something that I hope we are able to realize as teachers as we spend a lot of time working together. I do believe that with this knowledge, we can be aware of this and not let it hurt our work. I also liked the way that Sarah discussed the responses of the students. I think, that in my experience, this is something that I often overlook. When in reality it is extremely important. What the students are "getting" out of the lesson is in fact the goal, therefore it is something that teachers should be mindful of. I hope that myself, and my fellow classmates, are able to take all of this knowledge and help our students learn and enjoy school.
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