#5Practices Book Study: Chapter 3 "Investigating the Five Practices in Action"

Today we are blogging about Chapter 3 of the #5practices book study.  For more information read here #5practices Book Study. Each Tuesday morning I will post a chapter summary with discussion questions, reflections, and a link up for you to share your blog post. Please make sure you read and share comments on others' posts.  Don't feel you have to follow the structure as set up when writing your post.  If you prefer to just blog about what you read, do that.  The discussion questions will be prompts for anyone looking for some guidance as to what to blog about. There is no right or wrong way to participate.  Use #5practices on Twitter to also share your blog post.  Any twitter discussion about the reading should include the same hashtag.  If there is interest in a scheduled twitter chat time to discuss the reading, we can decide on that as we go.  If you are not active on twitter now is a great time to start, or you can just link up with your blog posts if you prefer.

This chapter was analyzing an 8th grade lesson where students solved a tiling a patio problem.  The mathematical ideas the teacher wanted her students to understand were:  linear functions grow at a constant rate, there are different but equivalent ways of writing an explicit rule that defines the relationship between two variables, and the rate of change of a linear function can be highlighted in different representational forms.

First off I could not believe they talked about an overhead projector being used.  Do people still use those?  I know I'm getting sidetracked from the point of this post, but back in the day I LOVED my overhead projector, but I've had a SMARTBoard for the past 6 years and it just struck me as so old school to be still using an overhead.  I'm not judging and told you I had much love for my projector, I guess this book has a 2011 copyright so it's plausible.  OK sorry, but I'm just curious how many people still use an overhead.

Alright back on task. The chapter basically walked us through her lesson and interactions with students.  It showed evidence of use of several of the 5 Practices by the teacher.  This chapter did a good job of showing how the 5 Practices work build on each other and work to support the orchestration of a productive discussion.  It really shows how much planning goes into a lesson before (anticipating) and during (monitoring, selecting,sequencing, connecting) the lesson itself. I liked seeing the progression through an actual lesson.

This week I'm not posting any discussion questions, feel free to post your own discussion questions in your blog posts.

get the InLinkz code

An InLinkz Link-up

#5Practices Book Study: Chapter 2 "Laying the Groundwork: Setting Goals and Selecting Tasks"

Today we are blogging about Chapter 2 of the #5practices book study.  For more information read here #5practices Book Study. Each Tuesday morning I will post a chapter summary with discussion questions, reflections, and a link up for you to share your blog post. Please make sure you read and share comments on others' posts.  Don't feel you have to follow the structure as set up when writing your post.  If you prefer to just blog about what you read, do that.  The discussion questions will be prompts for anyone looking for some guidance as to what to blog about. There is no right or wrong way to participate.  Use #5practices on Twitter to also share your blog post.  Any twitter discussion about the reading should include the same hashtag.  If there is interest in a scheduled twitter chat time to discuss the reading, we can decide on that as we go.  If you are not active on twitter now is a great time to start, or you can just link up with your blog posts if you prefer.

The title of this chapter really summarizes what it is all about, laying the groundwork by setting goals and selecting tasks.  Selecting the mathematical goals for the lesson is a critical first step when planning and teaching a lesson.  The key is to select a goal that clearly identify what students are to know and understand about mathematics as a result of the lesson.

Several examples were given throughout the chapter of tasks with higher level or lower level demand.  This chapter emphasizes the importance of setting your mathematical goal prior to a lesson and selecting appropriate tasks.  It is important to do this prior to implementing the five practices.

Discussion Questions (my thoughts in blue)

1) How would you describe the relationship between the goal for a lesson and the instructional activities in which students are to engage during the lesson?  I think the goal you set for the lesson will impact the types of instructional activities you choose.  Selecting high level open ended activities will allow students to go beyond learning a concept as simply a set of procedures.

3)  The authors argue that what students learn depends on the nature of the task in which they engage.  Do you agree with this point of view? Why or why not?  I definitely think that the depth of student learning is impacted by the type of tasks they complete as well as whether the tasks are over scaffolded or not.  Sometime we take a high level task and provide too much scaffolding for the students and essentially break the problem down to a step by step level that shuts down the possibility of students discovering on their own a viable method to solve the problem.  

4)  What do you see as the cost and benefits of using high-level (i.e., cognitively challenging tasks) as the basis for instruction?  The benefits are a deeper understanding of the learning goals and also often times seeing connections between the task and other mathematical concepts.  The costs are definitely time, you need to provide students adequate time to make these discoveries.  Students also need to be taught perseverance and to embrace productive struggle from this type of task.  Many students are only concerned with getting the correct answer and don't appreciated the learning that takes place as they struggle to achieve the task.

Feel free to share this link up in your own blog post.

get the InLinkz code

An InLinkz Link-up

#5Practices Book Study Begins January 13th

I'm really excited to be hosting another online book study that will be starting on January 13th.  I delayed the start time a couple weeks so anyone who needs to pick up a copy of the book has time to do that.  We will be reading and discussing 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions by Margaret S. Smith and Mary Kay Stein.

I hate to go all Charlotte Danielson on you all, but that is my reality and my PPG this year is Component 3b:Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques
Elements include:
› Quality of questions/prompts
› Discussion techniques
› Student participation

I'm really hoping this book study will help me improve both questioning and discussion techniques in my math classroom.  It is my goal to enrich my collaborative classroom culture to include student initiated higher order questions and thoughtful student led discussions prompted by rich mathematical tasks.

Each Tuesday morning I will post a chapter summary with discussion questions, reflections, and a link up for you to share your blog post. Please make sure you read and share comments on others' posts.  Don't feel you have to follow the structure as set up when writing your post.  If you prefer to just blog about what you read, do that.  The discussion questions will be prompts for anyone looking for some guidance as to what to blog about. There is no right or wrong way to participate.  Use #5practices on Twitter to also share your blog post.  Any twitter discussion about the reading should include the same hashtag.  If there is interest in a scheduled twitter chat time to discuss the reading, we can decide on that as we go.  If you are not active on twitter now is a great time to start, or you can just link up with your blog posts if you prefer.

Hopefully as the book study continues we will all be able to share stories and examples of how we are improving our discussions in our own classrooms.

Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments section or you can reach me on twitter @luvbcd  I'm looking forward to learning from and sharing with all of you!