Co-teaching With Three

Richard's co-teaching session was a bit different than his team member's.  The reason for that was that Richard has a student teacher with him, Cindy, and we pulled her into our lesson as well.  She took a real risk as she was not able to plan the lesson with us, but jumped right in and co-taught with Richard and myself.

The strand that Richard's Grade 2's are working on right now is measurement.  Richard and Cindy wanted to see what the students knew about time, and if there were any gaps that they needed to fill in prior to teaching the expectation for the grade.  The lesson was in the three - part lesson format:  Minds on:  Compare the times on a digital and analogue clock; Action: answer a problem based on one of the students in his class:  M started watching a TV show at 5:30pm (time shown in an analogue clock) when the show was over he looked at the time on the VCR and it said 6:00.  M said the show was a half an hour long.  Is he correct?  Explain your answer.  Then to Consolidate, we brought up two students who used two different strategies to share their work.

When the lesson was over Richard, Cindy and myself had the rest of the morning to moderate mark, give each student descriptive feedback on their work, and then do some planning for the remainder of the unit.

What was great about this debrief was not only did Cindy get to see all that is involved in planning and marking, but her and Richard got to have a really focused and professional discussion on strengths and needs of the students in the class.  This is especially important because it allows Cindy the chance to make real-time decisions about the students she is teaching, and plan for the remainder of the unit that she is teaching for her teaching block. 

After all of the descriptive feedback was done, and the feedback given to the marker students recorded on the template, they then sorted the next steps into areas of need.

These areas were:
a) use information from the question to help them;
b) make sure that all parts of the question are answered; and
c) add more specific details into the answer.

As Cindy plans the remainder of the unit, she's got some things to think about and make sure that she is incorporating into the unit.

Co-teaching, Co-learning, Co-growing

As part of Dorset Park's pathway, the teachers and admin have decided to take a more focused approach to their math pathway.  Since the division is small (3 teachers, 2 with split grades) they have opted to do co-teaching as a way to learn more about math, and to focus in on key ideas and strategies to help students in their classrooms.

Cathy teaches a 2/3 class.  Herself and the other 2/3 teacher each "swap" to have a grade in math.  Cathy teaches the straight Grade 3 class.  For our co-teaching session, we decided to do a pre-assessment task in graphing to see what the students could remember from previous years and help give Cathy some data on what the needs of her students were.  The lesson was structured in a three-part lesson format: Minds On:  Create a Line plot on eye colour in our classroom;

 Action: Compare our data to that from another class (we modified a task in the text to help us accomplish this) and discuss similarities and differences,

and then to Consolidate we made a Venn Diagram with the similarities and differences listed.

Our blackboard after our lesson.

When the lesson was done, Cathy and I had the rest of the morning available to do some moderated marking, and give descriptive feedback to each of the students.  Using the A 4 L tool during the lesson was also helpful as it gave us a starting point for discussion.  We recorded the feedback we gave her marker students on a specific "Marker Student Feedback" sheet that was shared by George, a current Teaching and Learning Coach who was a SWST teacher last year.  This helps us to have specific information about her marker students, and allows her to easily track their progress over the course of the year. 

When we were done giving descriptive feedback, we then sorted the steps for improvement into different categories. 

What we noticed was that there were four main areas that the students needed help with:
a) Organizing their answer;
b) Answering all parts of the question;
c) Using numbers to help justify their answers; and
d) Incorporating appropriate math vocabulary into their answer.

From these areas, Cathy is now able to begin teaching her unit with the needs of her students in mind.  She is able to plan her lessons around these ideas, and help the students become successful in meeting the expectations for this grade.