Collecting Data in 1st Grade Math

Exhibited by:

• Chelsea Crawford
• Olivia Occelli

PLO Attended:

• Integrated Co-Teaching: Using Data to Drive Instruction, K-12

Coached by:

• Maggie Callahan

1. PLO Goals – This is our second year teaching in an ICT classroom together. When we saw the information about this PLO we thought it would be helpful for us. We weren’t always sure that we used the information that we knew about our students, to truly aid in their instruction. We were looking to make their learning experiences more effective.
2. PLO Learnings – We learned about taking the data that we collected to make accommodations and modifications in our math teaching to best support our students’ needs.
3. Implementation of Techniques and Practices – After our second PLO meeting, we decided to focus on math. We gave the students a pre-assessment that focused on subtraction before we began teaching it formally. We worked together to examine their assessments and thought about the teaching models that would work best throughout our unit. We found that our students fit into about three larger categories. We decided that station teaching was something that worked well for our students and was something we enjoyed planning for. Based on the information we learned about the students in the three groups, we each planned different learning experiences that focused on the needs of each group. We not only came up with different tasks for the groups, we tailored the work to actually meet their learning needs (changing the numbers in story problems, focusing on drawing strategies for solving versus using manipulatives or known facts, etc.)
4. Impact – As we taught we saw where students were beginning to have better understandings. We could also see what they were still having challenges with. Based on this we made games and activities to help them think through these things. After giving an end of unit assessment, we were able to see that students genuinely began to understand the concept of subtraction better. They were better able to use strategies to solve subtraction word problems, compute the answers to subtraction equations, and identify the appropriate equation format to use when thinking about documenting their subtraction work (using the addition symbol versus the minus sign).
5. Reflection – We feel as though participating in the PLO helped us be more successful in implementing more focused instruction for our students. We were able to better group students in ways that helped us provide instruction that was the most appropriate.

Next Steps – We would like to be more thoughtful about the assessments that we build for our students. This way, we can build pre and post-assessments that really focus on the things that we want to know about our students’ thinking. We would also like to sit and think about the kinds of ICT teaching models that support our students best, depending on the content being taught.