Video 2.1 Response
The first thing that I noticed was that the teacher had the students in one section of the classroom. This strategy was mentioned in the book. “Select a designated location that allows you to maintain close proximity to your students for informal observations and interactions.” Another thing was that the teacher asked for multiple strategies while recording them on the whiteboard. The dots she used to help the students focus on the numbers was also important. Having something physical makes it much easier to workout math problems, such as the unifix cubes we had in class our first day. The students could go up to the board to help explain their strategy. After the teacher had a bunch of strategies on the board, she lead a discussion about specific strategies that they had learned in class. These connections between the strategies such as 10’s and doubles helped the students understand how to apply the things they learned to different problems.
Besides the math strategies, the students had also used had signals for “me too.” This was a good way for the students to indicate that they got the same answer or not. It allows the teacher to see instead of trying to hear which students are struggling and which are not. It also keeps the classroom noise at a reasonable level.