Skills for High-level discourse
You can’t just expect that students will use group time effectively. If you want them to use higher-level discourse you need to tell them that. If you can do that then cooperative learning can be used to simulate hypothesizing, analyzing and looking for logic and patterns. You have to design activities that allow or force the students to talk to one another. The book suggests we start doing this around middle grades.
In math I think is really important. I was having a discussion the other day about how lost students have a tendency to get in math. I think we need to teach students how to ask questions that will be helpful in clarifying their learning. This isn’t exactly the idea put forth in this chapter but I think it is also necessary. Before we can get students to talk about math we need to teach them what to do when they are really lost. After that we need to show them how that translates in to higher-level discourse.
The book has an activity it suggests for this is called Rainbow Logic. It gives the students a set of rules and makes one student the teller (pretty much) this game teaches asking and responding and following logic. I really like all these activities in this book and I would really like to start them with my class. I feel like I should wait until I have my own room. Should I start at the beginning at the year?
When to start... I suggest, unless feeling way restricted, to try a few things this coming semester.
ReplyDeleteOn being lost: I fully agree, but... I believe a student is "lost" usually when trying to make sense of someone else's understanding (that is usually the teacher's when I see lost kids in a math classroom). When the class is restructured for kids to do the thinking, and sharing thinking with one another, that they don't get lost with their own thinking, and are also much better at talking to each other in kid language to share their own thinking on problems--and ask each other. When lost in this context, it might be on what a problem posed is asking for...