Week 9 Bode

          This week I want to focus on a piece of student work that displays a low level student while working with a middle level student. Both these students I have observed during math and helped them quite a bit; one struggles with the math content while the other tends to get distracted and off task. The activity was called Penny Grab where students have 20 pennies that they put in a pile between them. One student grabs a handful of pennies and the other student takes the rest. Both students count how many pennies they have. Once they have counted their pennies, the partners have to decide who has more pennies. While I was watching these partners working together I was noticing the middle level student was doing all the answering for who had more. I wanted to monitor this because I felt it was important for the low level student to answer too. When I asked the lower level student to count with us and see who has more she could count how many she had and how many her partner had but she got shy when she was answering who had more. She answered that she had more (she had 8 pennies while her partner had 12) but then looked up at me to see if her answer was correct or not. Instead of me telling her no she is wrong I asked her partner to explain who has more and how he knows that. Her partner was successful at explaining because he was able to say “well I have 12 and she has 8 and I know that 8 is more than 12 because on the number line, 8 is less than 12.” After that I had the girl try to answer again and this time she had 11 pennies and her partner had 9. I saw her look down at the number line and take a minute to see which number was larger. She answered 11; I was so impressed to see that a student gave another student a successful strategy to use.

            In order to advance this students thinking (the low level student) I really think that partner working is successful but it has to be an appropriate partner whom I know will not just give her the answers. She tends to get really shy around teachers because she’s timid to answer so I believe that when she works with a partner she can see their strategies and learn how to use them herself. Another strategy I would do is have students share strategies they use on a problem in a whole group discussion. This way students are sharing their ideas (which we already do) however to make it different I would want to maybe demonstrate having other students, like this struggling girl, come up to the board and solve the problem by using the strategy another student explain. If the student doesn’t understand the strategy than I would have the child who thought of the strategy explain it to the child who is solving the problem. This is not a way to text students or scare them, it’s to demonstrate and have low level students work our problems using strategies they may not have thought of that can be helpful to their learning.