Over the summer I wrote (here and here) about my efforts to shift my math instruction from whole-group dominated to a more small-group oriented structure. As the first quarter draws to a close, I am feeling very good about this decision. Students are more active and more engaged for more of the math block than my group was last year. Preliminary assessment data also has me optimistic that this method is going to produce significant gains for my group of learners. Advantages to Guided Math As I anticipated over the summer, moving to guided math has made it much easier to differentiate my math instruction. It also increases the ease of incorporating concrete representations into my students' guided practice, which responds to their developmental needs. Working in a small group with every student, every day has also created a formative assessment feedback-loop that I didn't know would exist, and that is really improving my instruction. Here's an example from last week that incorporates all three: It was our first lesson explicitly about addition. I would say and write an addition equation, then students would write it and use Target mini-erasers to model it. (Fun manipulatives like mini erasers are SO much easier to manage in small group than whole group; for one thing, fewer of them tend to walk away). Although most of the children at the table had successfully modeled 4 + 7 = ___, two students had placed four erasers under the number four and only three erasers under the number seven. Both of them had written 4 + 7 = 7 . "Oops!" I said, "You need four here and then seven here. How many do you have?" These students both counted "One, two, three, four," touching the erasers under the number four, and then continued "five, six, seven," as they counted the erasers under the number seven. This misconception manifested a few times in this particular pair of students, and in a few students in each of my other two small groups--and I would NOT have anticipated it. Connecting the right quantity of objects to the written numeral is an essential part of understanding what a number means, and making this concrete was essential for this group of learners. Luckily, because I was meeting with these students in a small group setting, I could 1) quickly notice their error 2) directly address their error by saying "Look, here is a seven. So you need seven erasers under it--but there are only three! Can you fix it?" 3) Observe whether they changed their representation following my advice, without other students getting off task (I gave the others in the group another equation to model). 4) Make a note of the error and be on the lookout for whether they made it again (they did) 5) Plan to address the importance of checking that you have represented the exact number in the equation in subsequent guided practice sessions. Some of the above would be possible during whole group guided practice. Then again, I might never have noticed a few students making this error, and never have helped them correct it. Of course, there are some challenges to guided math.
First, I don't monitor my students' worksheet work ("math by myself") and my para professional is only sometimes available to do so--so, some students spend that portion of the workshop repeating the same errors over and over. (Then again, that happened last year, when everyone did worksheets at the same time and I monitored them, too.) Second, it's really important that students understand that math tubs are part of doing math work, and that it is unacceptable to goof off during math tub time. I have dealt with goofing in three ways: 1) pushing myself to frequently change out the math activities to avoid boredom 2) explicitly teaching students to choose tubs they know how to play to avoid non-mathematical noodling 3) immediately sending goofers to take-a-break for the rest of the rotation and even removing a highly popular, frequently goofed tub as an option. Third, I'm not sure guided math requires much more planning than any careful implementation of a new-to-the-teacher math curriculum, but it's not less work to teach the same curriculum in a new format than it was to teach it for the first time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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AuthorI'm Ms. Howland. I teach first grade in Spanish and English in a transitional bilingual model. Click any photo to learn more!
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