Touchstone 11: Coach students to mastery

Many of my teachers growing up were of the “professor” variety. They viewed their job as delivering information and it was the student’s responsibility to absorb the knowledge and the reproduce what information they were able to retain on an exam. In order to maximize learning and retention of knowledge the modern teacher is much more akin to a “coach.” It is the teacher’s responsibility to design activities intended to create authentic learning, guide students through these activities, and provide detailed feedback to students so that they may self correct and continue to learn. The best tool I have found for assisting my coaching in the classroom is Pear Deck. My student is one-to-one with Chromebooks for every student. Pear Deck is a tool that augments Google Slides presentation, so that students may have the presentation in front of them and interact with the teacher from their individual device. Goodwin and Hubbell (2013) delineate several common techniques in the classroom for for student response. Many of these techniques are enhanced through the use of Pear Deck. The tools included in the add-on can be used for temperature checks or quick polling to more detailed typed and drawn responses.Students can have a Turn and Talk and then type their answers to share with the class. After locking the responses for a class discussion, the entire class or individual students can receive feedback from the teacher and then return to their responses to edit them. Even in the best of circumstances, the first instruction may not be enough. When re-teaching must occur, my favorite routine is to chart the error. A video of the process will be linked below, but the basics of the technique is to provide students with two work samples on a poster. Students are asked to vote on which answer they think is correct, given time to think and then the teacher asks students from either side to justify their reasoning. Eventually, another poll is taken with the hope that students have come to an understanding of the correct response. Then the teacher prompts students to write a recommendation to themselves of how to avoid similar errors in the future. The routine finishes with the teacher crossing out the incorrect response and using student responses to draft a class approach to the type of error examined. The routine is powerful because it has many built in opportunities for deep thinking and self-reflection, but also provides the class with an anchor chart that can help students in the future.

References:

Home. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.peardeck.com/

MS Math - Chart the Error - Compound Volume. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://video.achievementfirst.org/media/MS Math - Chart the Error - Compound Volume/0_0cvj0abp/37159131