Teachers Teach!

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Precise Praise.  In this technique the teacher provides the student with precise praise about the work that she has been doing in class and comments on her participation.  He focuses on the work she did and connected it to his observation of her participating in discussions.  He then goes on to say that because of that participation is probably why her ideas are good.  He is providing the student with constructive feedback to let her know that she is doing an “industrious” job.  This is a great word to use because he is commenting on her actions not her traits, which is a big part of Precise Praise.

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Standardize the format technique.  In this technique answers are to be streamlined for the teacher to easily check for understanding around the room.  Notice how she is explicit in ensuring students understand where to put their answers.  I love the way she moves around the room checking students work before they move forward with more independent work.  All of this data is complied until she has a tally of which students to call forth for small group instruction and then after she is done with them she moves on to another group while still scanning the room while students perform independent work.  Love this!

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Wait Time 

The TLAC strategy Wait Time is an excellent way to elicit many student response.  It allows more students the time to think about the question and process the the answer versus the teacher moving on immediately eliciting a response from the same student who raises his/her hand after ever question.  This can be a really helpful strategy when students with IEPs and ELLs are in the classroom.  Also, if students know that the teacher will wait after every question waiting for more students to think about the answer students will be more engaged.  Furthermore, I really like how this teacher restates the answer to a previous question to then move on to the next question, providing some scaffolding support for students. 

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Clip 26

In this video the teacher uses her time very efficiently in an effort to keep students engaged and always working on the task at hand.  She sets an alarm showing the students the timer and gives them a very specific task to do, which the students understand as it is part of their routine.  She promptly begins after the time is up and prompts students asking them what they understood.  This is great as she elicits student response after they have had time to do notes with their partner.

[mspistolpete-blog]

Many students were struggling with using the standard algorithm for solving multi-step equations so I found this method in my search using tape diagrams.  I really liked tape diagrams when teaching ratios and proportions in middle school for the visual aspect of it.  My students with learning disabilities also really liked it.  I’m hoping that students learned this method in middle school so that they can use prior knowledge when practicing this.  When I showed it to students in my class, after separating groups based on ability level to do some remedial practice, these students really liked it and found it to be helpful.

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I stumbled across this video while looking for resources for my unit on expressions and really fell in love with the way this video introduces slope intercept by connecting it with real world examples like roller coasters, dirt biking, and stair case image.  I would probably stick to showing the first part of it since it is a lot of information to expose to the students at once.  #slopeintercept #algebraisawesome #algebraislife

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Math tiles can be a great way for students to conceptualize multi-step equations.