StWorkPT2 Reflection

 Our strengths included finding questions to ask students and creating an objective.  I also think one of our strengths came with providing meaningful feedback to the students to reach the objective we created.  Part of this was finding questions to ask students but also redirecting them to a deeper understanding of what the question is asking and what they are expected to find.

Our weaknesses of this project included identifying next steps for instruction for the whole class based on the focus students and being unsure of what was expected for some parts of the project. We discussed what steps we needed to take for the focus students, but struggled when it came to making the implications apply to the entire class when only some needed redirection of the topic.  It was also a challenge to decide how to explain that each child had a different size pizza without directly telling them, so we had the students focus on what the question was asking and what information it gave us.

Our group worked well together.  To begin, we went through all the possible answers and compiled a list of potential solutions for each classification (minimal, partial, and satisfactory).  Once we decided which solutions we would use for each category, we discussed conjectures and what the student did wrong.  Based on that, we created curricular implications to give not only the student at the classification level, but also all students in general.  They were specific to the example.  These implications were related to the learning objective and we all agreed on the objective before creating any implications.  The efforts towards this project were extremely equal and we worked together throughout the whole project.  We were together when working on it and we each gave ideas for different techniques to use and implications to make and we were respectful of one another’s opinions.  If I had any questions on something I was working on, the other two would assist me and I would also help them when they had questions.

I learned more about what I learned during the first part of the project.  The second part had a different problem with a wider variety of answers than the ones before.  The answers were theories of how one child had more or less pizza than the other.  I think the number one thing students needed to do in this problem was focus on the words “José ate one half of a pizza” and “Ella ate one half of another pizza.”  Right off the bat, students should see these are two different pizzas.  I learned that there are ways to get students to notice what they are missing without directly telling them what they should be looking for.  There are questions that need to be asked in order to provoke their understanding of what the problem is asking.  Not all students need the same feedback, but a lot of them could benefit from similar suggestions.