Total Participation Techniques Making Every Student an Active Learner

Chapter 9 Building a TPT-Conducive Classroom Jigsaw

Reflection Questions What are your thoughts on the importance of student interaction?

What have you noticed regarding students who do and do not experience success in your classroom?

What are the dynamics of peer rejection and peer acceptance in your classroom? What role can you play in promoting peer acceptance?

How is trust evident in your classroom? What can you do this year to increase the trust and student confidence in your classroom?

How can trust and accountability coexist within a classroom?

If you had to add to this chapter one more essential ingredient for creating a TPT- conducive classroom, what would you add? Why?

Chapter 9: Building a TPT-Conducive Classroom In order for TPT to work, teachers must become comfortable with losing some of their "talking time" and letting children take the reigns. Students must have confidence in their teacher, in their peers and in themselves, while teachers need to build confidence in their students. "What have you done today to build trust?" M. Webber

How Students Learn National Research Council of the National Academies

What are associations with mathematics so negative for so many people?

Math is rarely taught making use of the following principles: 1)Teachers must engage in students’ preconceptions. 2)Understanding requires factual knowledge and conceptual frameworks. 3)A meta-cognitive approach enables student self-monitoring.

Engage Students’ Preconceptions Connecting, building upon, and refining the mathematical understandings, intuitions, and resourcefulness of students Instruction often overrides students’ reasoning processes, replacing them with a set of rules and procedures that disconnects problem solving from meaning making.

Instead of organizing the skills and competencies required to do mathematics fluently around a set of core mathematical concepts (principle #2), those skills and competencies are often themselves the center and sometimes the whole, of instruction.

Procedural knowledge is often divorced from meaning making, so students do not use metacognitive strategies (principle #3) when the engage in solving mathematics problems.

Box 5-1

Not only did he neglect to use meta-cognitive strategies to monitor whether his answer made sense, but he believes sense making is irrelevant.

Adding It Up Argues for an instructional goal of “mathematical proficiency” Much broader than mastery of procedures Five intertwining strands constitute mathematical proficiency

Mathematical Proficiency 1)Conceptual understanding 2)Procedural fluency 3)Strategic competence 4)Adaptive reasoning 5)Productive disposition

Standard for Mathematical Practice

Common Preconceptions about Mathematics Mathematics is just about learning to compute.

Mathematics is about “following rules” to guarantee correct answers.

All in the “jeans” Some people have the ability to “do math” and some don’t.

Students can feel lost not only when they have forgotten, but also when they fail to “get it” from the start. Conventions have been adopted for the convenience of communicating efficiently in a shared language. If students learn to memorize procedures but do not understand that the procedures are full of such conventions adopted for efficiency, the can be baffled by things that are left unexplained. ex. Y=mx+b (why m for slope, why not s?)

Digging Deeper 1)Teachers must engage in students’ preconceptions. 2)Understanding requires factual knowledge and conceptual frameworks. 3)A meta-cognitive approach enables student self-monitoring.