Working in Groups!!

Today, I am going to step away from talking about what was learned in class this week and transition my blog towards what I experienced in math during my placement this past structured experience day. My students are extremely hard working and in Grade 8, and they are focused on good grades and understanding math for when the move to secondary school. Many students want to be on the "honour role" and achieve academic excellence. They are motivated. The students have an upcoming mid-chapter test on patterning and algebra, something many of the students are not too strong with. However, there are students who excel at this strand of math and are great leaders in the classroom. This is when I was able to take what I learned in math class at Brock and apply it to my classroom. My associate teacher (I helped!!!) used something called conferencing ( or similar) which was simply putting the students into groups and having them work together, creating discussion and a great learning environment.

When the students were grouped they were assigned specific questions to work on as a team, and were grouped fairly and evenly so that some weaker students had the help of the stronger students. The groups transferred there work to chart paper and posted it for the class to see. What I really liked about this method is that a lot of the time, the students were engaged, often splitting the workload, completing the question and then discussing the reasoning behind this answer. This is a great tool for a peer evaluation as they are able to see the different strategies students in the group, as well as in other groups, used to find a solution. Also, the students were able to correct each other if there were mistakes, allowing them to see what they did wrong and gain another perspective. If I had one complaint it would be that sometimes, those who understand it more, would take over, and want to finish quickly. this takes away from the other learners as they are not able to try the problems themselves, they are simply observing the other students do the work.

Overall the group work ran smoothly, they were able to complete the review questions and post their solutions on the wall as reference. Being able to see specific strategies used by the students helped me understand their learning style as well as helped the other students with differentiated solutions.

Below are some of the work that they did.