• definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    8 hours ago

    I don’t have time to get into the full 13 (? iirc) steps of Liljedahl’s Thinking Classrooms approach, but it’s exactly designed to meet the needs of students like you. Since highlights:

    • Students are randomly assigned to a new group of 3 daily
    • All students work on vertical whiteboards, or equivalents
    • The teacher presents a math task that starts easy-ish, but requires some work/thought to figure out
    • If 30% of students in the room understand the task, then it will quickly trickle between groups
    • The teacher circles exemplars of great thinking; students are not allowed to erase these until the next debrief
    • The teacher regularly cycles back to get students to explain their work to the class, showcasing and explaining the bits the teacher circled
    • Start over with a more advanced task/“next step”

    It’s an incredibly effective teaching method for secondary math. And there’s clear motivation every step of the way for what you’re doing and why it matters.

    And the teacher only explains about 5-10% of the material; everything else is explained by the students as the carefully curated progression of activities guides them through discovering the math themselves.