Friday, May 6, 2016

Another Day With Michelle and Jigsaw

This blog will discuss my second visit from Michelle. This time the visit was even more exciting for me because she was able to show me the Jigsaw strategy to support student learning. Students were learning about how to solve for area of parallelograms and trapezoids. She was able to get students taking on most of the teaching and learning. Students were given 7 problems for hwk. They were divided up into several groups and each group was assigned one of the problems.Each group had to review and discuss their solutions and become experts with their problems. After 15 minutes, students were given the opportunity to join another group and each person in the group would be an expert for one of the problems. Students were able to review and discuss the rest of the problems and students that were confused in the group can look to the "Student Expert" for the clarification and explanation. It was awesome to see the students supporting and teaching each other. Afterwards, I asked the whole class to share their thinking. Students were given an exit ticket that would demonstrate to  me that they understood the learning. Most students did well but I still had a few that struggled. That told me that maybe I could get these students more support with this standard. Overall , I felt the lesson went great and I will most definitely use it again.
This blog will talk about my first visit with Michelle. It was a really long week and I was feeling unmotivated about the content and the teaching I had to do with it. Luckily, Michelle was coming to save the day for me. I really enjoyed watching her use the writing strategies to get me and the students more engaged. She was able to show me the strategies and how to implement it in the classroom in real time. It got students excited and really working together to share their responses and support each other. The students were also  on tasked with the science activity.  Michelle was able to get the students to have more lively discussions and get them to pick out important ideas and content as it related to the unit. These strategies got kids moving and thinking.I thanked Michelle because I felt the kids and I were really bored and she made the review exciting.