For the first time since my children were born, I agreed to teach summer school this year. It was not a true summer school program, just a three week program designed to provide extra support for students who struggled during the school year. The vast majority of the students had IEP's and there was no assigned special ed teacher or aide support. I was assigned an ELA class, but the math teacher for 8th grad expressed a desire for more support and I agreed to help her as well. She was participating a book study of Peter Liljedahl's book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics Grades K-12 and wanted to try some of his ideas. Consequently, I bought the book, read it and prepared to jump in trying his approach.
The first three things he recommends working with are giving thinking tasks, forming visibly random groups and using vertical, nonpermanent surfaces. Some might say they always use thinking tasks, but all too often that is not true. Just jumping in with thinking tasks in math tends to flop, so he recommends starting with three days of non-curricular tasks. Since we had a total of 12 sessions over three weeks with students not all attending for the entire time, spending one quarter of the time this way, seemed potentially problematic. The plan became: start each day with a noncurricular task and then use thinking tasks later in the same day that were curricular. We also ended with thinking tasks.
Tasks like how many sevens are there if you write the first 100 numbers, do not require complex math, but do ask students to use critical thinking to explore an idea. Our students were randomly assigned to groups of two or three were assigned to a whiteboard or chalkboard space to solve the puzzle. They were required to all be able to explain how they arrived at their answer so that accountability was built in. Students who had spent the school year dodging work and feeling math stupid all had to stand up and work in their groups. Surprisingly, no one dodged work. They all participated and slowly they built some confidence in their ability to do hard math things. No we did not create a group of master problem solvers, but we did increase their feelings about their personal abilities. One caveat, we had a student from a self contained class and one who spent the year with 1:1 aide support. These students needed extra support to stay on task and participate. They needed prompting to use their calculators to get answers to arithmetic problems. Their peers were not enough to keep them engaged and an aide was secured to help them be successful.
Working at the boards helped students stay engaged, Nearly the entire group had ADHD. Being able to stand and move a bit, met their needs and helped to keep them participating. Being in groups of 2 or 3, meant they could not rely on their group to do all the work for them. Being asked to explain what was done, meant they had to pay attention and verbalize success solutions. With two teachers in the room, we were able to monitor the groups, offer hints as needed and provide encouragement to continue. I can see where a co-taught class or a large class might make this much more challenging. explained about their group. While some preferred to work with particular people, they good-naturedly participated in their assigned group. (Using self-selected groups with the same students during ELA showed preferential relationships, but the groups were not consistently productive like they were in math.)
Students liked working on the boards. The vertical surfaces meant that a teacher in the middle of the room could monitor progress, provide help as needed and distribute new tasks as the old ones were accomplished. Curricular task progressions were an important component of the middle of the lesson. We asked students to find slope using a graph where they had to identify points and use rise over run. They practiced with positive slopes, negative ones and a few grappled with slopes of 0. Questioning each group when they arrived at a solution ensured proper notation of work and understanding before a more challenging task was assigned.
This approach worked for our struggling math students. I would love the opportunity to try it out more with students. I really liked the potential to build math confidence, persistence and problem solving even for our neediest students.
The book is an easy read. He recommends practicing with his steps in a three step sequence. We only practiced the first step. Looking forward to trying this with different groups.
