{"id":813,"date":"2016-10-05T23:48:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T03:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/?p=813"},"modified":"2017-01-02T00:17:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-02T05:17:32","slug":"clog-context-and-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/2016\/10\/05\/clog-context-and-content\/","title":{"rendered":"CLOG: Context and Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about a moment from\u00a013 years ago while I was observing Kellie Huhn teach sophomores during my time\u00a0MSU. 13 years have made\u00a0the details of the lesson very fuzzy (F.O.I.L.? Standard Form? Quadratics?). What comes back to me was\u00a0a\u00a0quick explanation she made about the decision to go “off book” for a lesson. She could have said this:\u00a0“These kids are getting a little antsy because we are going through all this content so I’m going to have to give them something in context.” It was clear that the class wasn’t behaving poorly, and were ‘doing the work’, but everything seemed deflated. Kellie picked up on this and was using her pedagogic license to direct the class through an activity that would recapture the kids minds. Again, I’m fuzzy on the details on what that actually was (Card sort? Skits? Rich problem set?), but the though still stays with me.\u00a0As a teacher whose teaching was so non-traditional, I’m pretty sure that my 3 or 4 months of observations taught me\u00a0that teaching doesn’t have to mean\u00a0following the book, and challenged me to be\u00a0inventive as I serve my future students.<\/p>\n

So this long weekend I was thinkingabout adding energy to <\/a>my current class<\/a>\u00a0when Kellie’s comment about content and context came to mind. Instructional routines and tasks can seem pretty dry for kids. Without balance it feels\u00a0a lot more like mastering content than it does real-world context for students. While we spent the\u00a0last week of class tying together the various representations of\u00a0linear functions, we may have forgot why they\u00a0make our lives easier. It seemed time to take Kellie’s words to heart.\u00a0In thinking of that I decided to adjust the unit a little. I took a\u00a0modeling activity from 2 weeks from now and decided to run a simpler version of it today.<\/p>\n

The actual task that I got was from Dan Meyer’s blog<\/a>\u00a0which asked\u00a0“How many Styrofoam cups<\/a><\/del>\u00a0unifix cubes would you need to be as tall as your teacher?” Kids could work together and think through the problem, take measurements, and make \u00a0a prediction. Since I have a crapload of unifix cubes, they could then actually physically put together the 103 (give or take) cubes to reach my height. In the end it ended up being less of a linear modelling activity and more of a estimation activity, but I think it was something that spoke\u00a0to the point of precision, counting, answering genuine problems, teamwork, and what math class is all about.<\/p>\n

(Side note: Before class started one girl who pulled me aside and asked if I thought she should transfer out of the class because it was too hard. At the end of this, her\u00a0group ended up getting the closest estimate, and it was largely because of her!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this\u00a0means that we aren’t where I wanted to be in the unit. The kids had a lot of fun and were able to apply a lot of the linear thinking that we have been doing to a real context. We’ll just have to derive the slope formula next class while we wrap up linear thinking with an end of the unit reflection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about a moment from\u00a013 years ago while I was observing Kellie Huhn teach sophomores during my time\u00a0MSU. 13 years have made\u00a0the details of the lesson very fuzzy (F.O.I.L.? Standard Form? Quadratics?). What comes back to me was\u00a0a\u00a0quick explanation she made about the decision to go “off book” for a lesson. She could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[23,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xz6U-d7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}