Sunday, February 9, 2014

Engaging Students In Math

For this week's post, I wanted to share a video from the Teaching Channel (www.teachingchannel.org). In this video, the teacher discusses talk moves she uses in her classroom to encourage student discourse. I love how this strategy gives every child a voice in the classroom while encouraging students' ideas and strategies. I hope you enjoy!

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The Best Thing To Have Your Students Do

I am reading a book for a course I'm taking by John Hattie called Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. In this book, Hattie discusses effect size in relation to student achievement. In research, effect sizes can be measured anywhere from 0.0 to 1.0. According to Hattie, "an effect size of 1.0 would mean that, on average, students receiving that treatment would exceed 84% of students not receiving that treatment." In simpler terms, 1.0 would mean very obvious change in improvement, where 0.0 would mean no change at all.

Chapter 4 of Hattie's book discusses effect sizes with contributions from the student. Of all the strategies listed in this section, the one with the largest effect size in his research was self-reported grades. (This had an effect size of 1.44!)

This doesn't suggest students need to be completing their own report cards. It does suggest, however, that students need to be given opportunities to estimate their own performance and reflect on their achievement levels. (Are Marzano's scales ringing a bell to anyone?)

Engage students in meta-cognition (thinking about their thinking) and require them to set high expectations for learning.

Please comment if you have successful ways for students to self-report their knowledge.

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting! The purpose of this blog is to serve as a learning community that shares best practices among elementary math teachers. The goal is to discuss reserach-based strategies that are aligned to common core practices. If you have a great idea for teaching math, please contact me and I'd love to feature you!