A Student Teacher, Teaching the Teacher

A Lesson on Felicia

I have ALMOST given the full reins to my student teacher lately every Thursday when she comes to volunteer. 

I use the word ‘almost’ because a student teacher never truly has their classroom management tested as they’re walking into a classroom with established norms and systems in place that hopefully protect supply/student teachers. 

I’m also in the room while she teaches, which affects the management of the classroom.  

On a separate note, for the first time in eight years, I can say that my applied classroom norms extend strongly even when I have a supply teacher (given the comments they leave behind).  That’s how receptive my students are this year. 

That just means that next year, my students will be wild and out of control, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, my student teacher is incredibly talented and is in her final year of teachers’ college.  I have learnt much from her style, approach and her creativity; case in point, take a look at her lesson on Felicia that she made up:

The question, I could see, resonated with the girls in my classroom.  I guess after questions involving video games, Usain bolt, etc. this was something new. 

My student teacher and I coordinated through my spiral curriculum well as the question was just a touch out of their comfort zone as they just finished learning solving equations and we’ve been through perimeter and area about two times before in previous spirals. 

The question was challenging as they got into groups of two or their ‘rate of change’ partners.  This question demanded the large whiteboards.   

For some reason, the students have been naturally lately looking to group their pairs into group of 4s and 6s.  I immediately broke up the group of 6 as I know that group was just too large.  I let the group of 4 stay as I knew that particular group of 4 worked well.  I still, prefer pairs, so I'll probably split them up next time.  

However, I wanted to see how well they worked and learnt; the next day, I went over it briefly and summarized positives and negatives of each group in terms of their process work, communication, without stating the answer. 

To truly assess how well they worked, I put up the question again.  Now, usually I am not a fan of re-doing a question, or re-assessing the same question, giving multiple opportunities, and doing it in groups…but I’ve been reading so many positive reviews of it that I decided to truly try it again.

It actually worked.

For thinking style type questions, putting the students in groups and allowing multiple opportunities created an environment of learning.  The majority of students actually tried it on their own (except the bottom 5% of the class where collaboration occurred immediately..) before starting to compare answers.  Upon finding differences, these students went through learning conversations where they justified each other’s work. 

For a question that we did yesterday and that I took up earlier, it took almost 20 minutes to get it done.  Some students didn’t even finish.  I guarantee you, as I walked around the classroom listening to their conversations, none of them were fooling around. 

Mind you, I still hesitate at the thought of doing summative thinking questions in groups with my academic students because I know the ‘Mr. Shin caught your mistake’ current environment I’ve set up would cause more of my students to copy off other students as opposed to learning it. 

I am really going to have to rethink my teaching as I found that those rich discussions that the students had with each other is worth designing the curriculum for.    

What’s hilarious is that the education world made this discovery about math education about 5 years ago when Dan Meyer first landed in a TedX talk.  Education has already moved on from this to the next phase – but at this point, the latest stuff is too progressive and far left reaching for me. I've never been an innovator; I've always been a late adopter myself to make sure the 'latest' trend actually sticks around and works with the common teacher.

Maybe if I was an elementary school teacher, I would make the jump ASAP to the latest educational trend; but as a secondary school teacher where post secondary institutions require a certain level of standardized skill, I don’t think I could ever make that jump.  

Maybe in another 5 years I’ll make the switch if it has proven to be more than the latest trend.

Things just move so fast. 

Anyways, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my student teacher for using her beautiful question as a springboard into student learning as well as mine.