Over the past
few weeks I have been teaching my 1st graders their math lessons and
working with them during independent work time while my mentor handles the 2nd
grade math time (divide and conquer we like to call it). Their lessons come from the Everyday Math
curriculum so those lessons, plus the smart board slides my teacher already has
prepared are what I have been using for instruction. However, I have been noticing that the
students are constantly surprising me with what I had anticipated as far as
their performance during lessons.
Lessons that I think will be a breeze for them turn out to be difficult,
and the lessons that I anticipate for them to struggle with they complete with
ease.
In our MSU classes we talk a lot about the importance of anticipating
student responses and trying to “be a step ahead” of what students might say or
do. However, this has been really
difficult lately. Though I completely agree
with the importance of anticipating student work, I am finding lately that
whatever I anticipate doesn’t quite add up to what happens during
instruction. For example, I did a lesson
on why we use calendars and how they are set up. Considering we do calendar every day in
morning meeting and that a calendar is posted right next to the smart board
(aka where they were sitting) I thought this would be a breeze. I thought students would easily be able to
recognize that each date gets assigned a number and they increase, that this
month is October, and so on. I prepared
a lot of extra materials for independent work time because I anticipated that
students would complete this with ease.
However, once I started the lesson my students were so confused. They were asking questions such as, “When I get
to Saturday, do I put a number?”, or “Do I count the days by 2’s?”. I had some students keep adding dates up to
40 after I had pointed out that the month ends on the 31st. My students basically shattered all of my
expectations and I felt defeated leaving them with a confusing lesson. The next day I tried it again with a
different approach and it seemed to be better.
On the flip side, this week I did a lesson on number stories/word
problems and how to look at the important information and find what the
question is asking. I anticipated this
being a difficult concept for my students to complete since they haven’t done
anything (in our class at least) about word problems yet. I had laid out the lesson really explicitly
for my own instruction to make sure I cover all the bases and that they get the
best explanation possible. Then, once I began
my students just took off with it. They had
no problem finding important information and solving problems. We did several examples as a group before I had
them break into pairs and try to write their own problems. I gave them a detailed template for how to
construct a good word problem and they all basically skipped to the end to
write out the problem as a whole. I got
some really great and relatable problems I was so pleasantly surprised! This past week in particular has really
taught me that no matter how prepared you are and how much you anticipate,
students can still amaze you.
These are all important principles. Remember that a teacher's pedagogical content knowledge is something that develops over time. We, of course, try to teach some of it in TE 402, etc., but much of it, as you are explaining, actually occurs by having contact with students and asking them about their thinking. I think the other important principle that this reveals is that it is important to remember that part of the purpose of anticipating student thinking and learning about student thinking is using it to modify your instruction. So even though you might not be able to anticipate everything, you are curious and interested by what the students say...the next step is to think about how you can use what you have learned about their thinking in order to make your instruction even more effective.
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