The Answer Isn't Always Right....But I Can See Where You Went Wrong

As an intermediate teacher Antonia struggles at times to get her students to show all of their thinking.  No matter how many times she explains to them that the correct answer is only a small part of the mark they still don't show all of their steps.  For this lesson she decided to do it as a bansho and focus in a bit more on having the students give descriptive feedback to each other to help them improve upon their work.  In this problem it became clear pretty quickly that although the students were doing a good job of showing their work, they missed out on one important piece in the question and then got the final answer wrong.  But - because they showed their work, Antonia was able to see where they went wrong and help them not make the same mistake again, and their mark wouldn't suffer too much.

To start off her lesson, the class reviewed the learning goals and success criteria for this strand:

They then did a minds-on activity based on their upcoming trip to overnight camp:

The action involved them deciding what bus company they should choose to make the trip.  She offered them three choices, all with different components to think about.  What was important to remember was that the bus needed to go up to Wahanowin and back - the trip is about 250km each way.  This was what most of the students forgot to do when they solved the problem.

For the consolidation, two groups volunteered to share their work with the class.  As a group, the class gave some descriptive feedback based on the success criteria that was co-created earlier.  The feedback was recorded on our bansho and then the rest of the class set off to give feedback (on post-it notes) to one other group.

When they were done, the students then went back (and in another colour / pen) and made changes to their work based on the feedback they were given.  Here are two examples of what the "edited" work looked like.