The SOCSD Teacher Leadership Teams (ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Technology) are participating in Instructional Rounds, a practice that enables teachers to work together across K-12 to improve instruction. This year, the Instructional Rounds are focusing on student conversations, debates, and pubic speaking to prepare for our upcoming Tri-States Visit in the spring. Math Instructional Coaches, Shannon Bogart (K-5), and Karen Connell (6-12), planned and facilitated the Math Leadership Team (K-12) meeting and the classroom visits. We reviewed the charts from the last meeting, which highlighted all of the opportunities students have to have conversations in math class, what those discussions look and sound like, and how we could document these conversations in the future, and visited classrooms at WOS, CLE, SOMS, and TZHS.
The questions the team focused on for the visits were, to what extent do students have opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations, debates, and public speaking in our classes and how do student conversations connect to units of study and demonstrate growth across K-12? The process for conducting Instructional Rounds includes documenting the task/activity, what the students are doing, and what the students are saying. Here are some examples of what we collected. We are also using digital audio and video to capture some of this evidence. Teacher leaders enjoyed the opportunity to visit schools and grades that are above or below what they typically teach.
Here are a few examples of the tasks and conversations students were having across K-12:
| What Was The Task? |
What Are The Students Doing? |
What Are the Students Saying? |
| Building Larger Numbers |
- Building a Ten Frame
- Playing a Build It
- Activity List after the game
|
- “We need to start with zero”
- I need one more
- I have twelve bears
- Count out loud
- How do you write the number 12?
- Where to put the 1 when writing 12 – “Maybe it goes here?” Student points in front of the 2
- What if we take turns
- Look at my work if you don’t understand it
- I wrote the number in the box so I don’t forg
|
| Learning about 3D Shapes |
- Geoblock Footprints Game
- Activity List with choices
|
- The triangle is this way and the others are pointed differently.
- It is a different angle.
- 6 vertices and 6 faces.
- It is a triangular prism.
- They all have three points and 3 sides.
- It is cube with square faces.
|
| Making Fraction Flags |
Creating a poster where they were dividing their flag into equal parts and complete a chart about their flag when they were done. |
- This is ¼, another ¼ is 2/4 the third box would be ¾ and the whole thing would be 4/4.
- What is a fraction?
- “It is like this” – sliced with his hand to show the fraction sign
- We made 5 parts so we made fifths.
- We made fifths, it is small but everyone gets a piece.
- We got it in two parts so it is a half.
- We made fourths but halves are bigger but we included everyone.
|
| Broken calculator activity |
Students had to figure out expressions of how to reach a number if the number 2 was broken on the calculator |
- Do you have to add next door to the tens?
- 6 plus 5, you know you have to regroup.
- It depends on the ones.
- This becomes a one because we need this to become a 9
- They told us yesterday we have to do the carrying over.
- That means you are smart. – one student said to another when they completed a task
- I borrowed all the way over to the 9.
- You always round higher.
- Look the numbers are getting lower.
|
| Subtraction with regrouping |
- White boards to practice first
- 6 different subtraction problems on a page
- Choice Activity List
|
| Linear Regression |
Reviewing for a test using practice problems |
- So we round to the nearest tenths?
- You need to plot the residual.
- What did I do wrong?
- I love that this is substitution for n.
- I am putting the data in to find the correlation coefficient.
- How did you get that?
- Is this scatter or a line plot?
- Did you do distributive first?
- Where did you get the 12 from?
- What is the difference between residual and what I have?
- You just need to graph these points?
- How do I graph them?
- Start at 8 go up 1 to get to 9.
- I got .86 I got .82 but let’s round it to .9 its close enough
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