Teacher Inquiry: The third post

Between gloss testing and camp its been a very busy couple of weeks.

I had high hopes for my presentation follow-ups but in hindsight I should have seen their short comings early on.

Getting students to create their own problems

- Seemed like a great idea because
would require higher order thinking to create problems that they could answer. 

- However in reality, students created any problem (often impossible to answer, or that would be too complex for them to answer) and would revert to an easier strategy that did not fit the problem. i.e. using addition for a subtraction question.

Explaining their solution/ strategy on a presentation

- Much harder than I anticipated for the kids to do.

- Students would normally solve these on paper then talk about them in our groups.  Being able to explain their thinking in writing is a skill we hadn't learned together yet, therefore I should of perhaps anticipated this would be difficult.

What next?

- From reflecting on my failed presentations I have started thinking of various plans I could do to using iPads and explain everything. However due to the time restrictions of testing and camp I haven't been able to put them into practice yet.

- However one adaption that worked well to my presentations, was to get students to solve problems in their books, and then screenshot their working. Then students would attempt to explain their solution in writing underneath. This worked much better and more than half of the class was able to do this correctly.  Of course I would like this task to work for everybody, so its still not perfect by any means. One thing I realised that was quite important was to give the students a question that was very similar to the one they had worked on as a group, therefore the unpacking of the question wasn't too difficult.

Example

Here's an example of how the presentation task can be a success.

There is still lots of room for improvement but I think it's beginning to get there.