Tweaking Lessons - Reflections from Phase 3
Tweaking Lessons - Reflections from Phase 3
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As a busy Term Three draws to an conclusion, I thought it best to reflect on phase 3 of our PMS implementation plan.
Our teams have been planning and creating lessons using our new teaching and learning framework of “Launch, Explore and Make Connections’ and the really exciting part is that their is a good buzz about maths in the school. Teachers are sharing and discussing ideas and wanting to experiment with parts of their lesson to make it better. I think I saw a tear in the eye of our principal when a story was shared about how much junior students were loving maths and some saying it was their favourite subject.
Something that has come up in discussions with the junior staff was the importance of ‘tweaking’ lessons to put the emphasis back on student thinking.
Last week, the juniors planned their Chance and Data sequence, trying to utilise the experiences gained from our previous sessions and incorporating the maths framework with us observing and helping. The lesson we were involved in was setting up scenarios for students to use the language of chance. The first lesson was exploring ‘impossible’ within a relevant context.
Now, I need to stress the lesson was sound with wonderful ideas and well thought out activities. The point of this discussion is to see what proficiencies we were enabling the students to use and if we were challenging students to do the ‘thinking’ or just whether they were just ‘doing’.
Firstly, I had the benefit of going into the meeting having seen the lesson multiple times in different classrooms. This gave me insights into what worked well from each room and helped me guide a thorough reflection with the teacher who had just taught the lesson. Most importantly, I wasn’t thinking about what to say next, or good prompting questions or maintaining an orderly classroom, which enabled me to consider ‘tweaks’ (This gave me a good realisation that we need to incorporate peer coaching into the overview next time!)
During our reflection time we discussed what we could do to ‘tweak’ the lesson in order to put emphasis back on student thinking.
This was the original prompt used.
Observations (from two classrooms)
The first session students were involved in 3 or 4 mini lessons involving chance outcomes. First a bowl of blocks with an impossible chance, then they would tally the results by conducting an experiment to see what would come out, then an activity where they were making a choice between impossible and possible, then a language builder of what was impossible, then the students came up with their own statements.
Students were challenged by collecting data in a fair and unbiased manner. Students were actively trying to collected the least likely block and celebrate it’s frequency. Some squinting and collecting or locating and grabbing the blue (19 other coloured and 1 blue) most times so their data reflected a different set of statistics. This proved difficult when discussing ‘unlikely’ as a term.
Students came up with ‘impossible’ scenarios that incorporated creativity and potential debatable topics. eg. Can fairies fly? Does a volcano have water? The tooth fairy will collect my tooth tonight (just came out that day). This had the effect of side tracking the maths lesson with discussion and debating.
The lesson was hard work. Getting students to reflect on the key concepts proved to be quite challenging. The teachers were bringing their ‘a grade’ questioning but were getting little from the students.
Tweaks we made
Using some of our experiences from the previous lessons and looking through the ‘closed to open questions from Doug and Barbra Clarke and Tony Flack’ resource we received at the PMS workshop, we discussed and implemented some changes.
Concentrating on one idea. The ideas were great, but reflecting on the success we had in the previous weeks, concentrating on launching and consolidating one of those ideas may have made it easier for the teachers and learners. By teachers, I mean instead of 5-6 activity ideas for the week, have 1 or 2 that you can change the variables to promote a deeper level of understanding. eg. I have a bowl with a unlikely chance, today I have a bowl with a 50/50 chance, what could it be? It would also mean that less time is taken up by explaining new activities, but using that time to set up challenges and methods (as previously found out during our addition and subtraction lessons). We chose to concentrate on the bowl of blocks idea because students could easily manipulate the blocks, they could visualise and draw the block scenario and was easier to prove chance outcomes. Eg. It is impossible to get a green because there are zero greens in my bag.
Nic used a brown paper bag when collecting the data and had greater success with the unbiased data, so we incorporated this idea.
Sam modelled a simpler version of the block activity by drawing 3 colour blocks and linking what was likely and unlikely, so we incorporated this idea but went to 6 blocks.
Creating a learning intention in the form of a question – What is the difference between ‘impossible’ and ‘unlikely?’ This was useful to refer to throughout the lesson and to guide our reflection.
Mindset goal – We had discussions around getting the students enjoy the process of finding out without running to the teacher after every attempt (preventing us to give quality time to our conferencing students). We were also unsure of when and how much depth to go into with this goal.
Timing – We had a big focus on how long we wanted it stage of the lesson to take. The warm up became a 5 minute activity with students working out which was bigger – 31 or 13? This was based on the last weeks work. Lou and I challenged each other to conference with 2 students each and move to the launch phase. Our launch was intended to be reasonably quick with the emphasis on students creating a bag of their own based on the first experience.
Launch – here is the prompt we used
This prompt was used with the Prep/One class and acted out as a story shell. The focus was to get students to think about what it could look like and have a chance to demonstrate reasoning as they justified that it was ‘unlikely’ to get one of the colours.
A nice thing that happened was that a student drew a green teddy bear in their bowl. We used this to model ‘impossible’. This became really useful during the reflection stage as we referred back to our original question of ‘impossible’ vs ‘unlikely’.
The consolidating task was for students to make their own bag of 6 blocks with 1 block unlikely to be taken out. The brown paper bag proved especially useful for unbiased data and the 6 blocks made recording the information much easier. It was great to see that students compare the data with the blocks chosen and work out if they thought it was unlikely.
Reflection
The biggest tweak we made was changing ‘make a bag with …..’ to ‘I have a bag with…. what could it look like’
Follow up lesson
I had the great pleasure of going back into the grade a few days later to see Lou modelling a maths lesson to a colleague. Here is the prompt she used:
Reflection
What stood out to me was Lou’s amazing story telling and how every student was hooked. The esky and photos of the fish were a magical touch – students were excited by the mystery! Lou had substituted unifix in a bowl for fish in an esky and the students loved it. They were linking the language of chance into a real context and saw it as plausible that one fish would be less likely than the other to come out. It was obvious that the ‘mindset mastery’ goal had been discussed and worked on in the follow up sessions because the students could explain what ‘depth over speed’ meant. I was very excited to hear them say it wasn’t about getting the answer the quickest but to think about different possibilities.
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