A really good teaching moment…

I was in a friend’s elementary classroom for a couple days, and was able to create a couple lessons (one social studies based, the other language arts) in advance. They were engaging and most students were very successful. I will probably repeat those lessons in other classes since they worked so well. Perhaps because I had spent time thinking about the capabilities of students at that age, or this particular class, I was already “tuned in” to possibilities when an opportunity for in-the-moment lesson creation occurred.

I was in need of an activity to fill a gap between when one set of kids finished a math activity and the others were still working on it, with half an hour or so left to go in the class.

From experience, I know that kids at almost every age need to work on how to “do” story problems in terms of interpreting from the words to the concepts they need to engage. I also knew this class was working on multiplication: basic facts as well as how to interpret real-life situations that use multiplication.

I know that when kids can work together that it supports many learning types and issues, and that the process of thinking about a good story problem and writing it down engages many areas of the brain. What I think I would do next time is add in the idea of drawing a picture to illustrate the story problem…

Other experience, as well as research I have done, tells me that “content area literacy” (the current buzzword) is something that all teachers should be thinking about. In other words, even in a math class, there are things to read, write, talk about, present…

So I decided to use several things:

• group work (mostly self-selected groups)
• student-generated story problems
• student presentation and explanation
• individual thinking work
• whole-class discussion

Most of the groups had about 15 minutes to generate two or three problems (which meant that they also engaged in self-monitoring for time, complexity of task and “keeping it real”). A few kids were not able to participate because they took the entire time to work on the previous activity. One or two students managed to individually write story problems!

We had about twenty minutes to share, and got through all (or most of) the groups, choosing their best story problem.

Listening to them, reading over some of the work a few turned in (I hadn’t asked them to turn in their work, I will next time), I discovered things about what they do and don’t understand (formative assessment). What I didn’t expect to get from the experience was the robust understanding of how the kids are connecting different parts of mathematics and literacies. Or not — the insights into why they might be struggling in specific areas were good for me to get.

The kids were:

• engaged
• productive
• cooperative
• respectful
• learning!

And when it was time to go to lunch… they actually wanted to stay a little longer!

Yep. A really good teaching moment.