Wednesday, February 6, 2008
January 24th Post
One common theme that seems to be talked a lot about in all of my classes lately is student involvement in small group activities. Last week in English we discussed the new book clubs that we would be participating in and the one that we would be observing. Also in math we have talked about how to get all students in a discussion involved, the same is true for my LLT class (teaching non-English speakers the English language). One thing I noticed about the book club that we observed on Monday was that everyone was participating. Although not everyone talked during the large class discussion, when we broke into the smaller groups everyone in mine was very willing to share their thoughts and ideas about the book. This is really important to make sure that everyone is able to participate in some way. Our book Scaffolding Language Scaffolding Learning talks gives different suggestions for group work in your classroom. Some of these suggestions relate directly to what we recently discussed in math, about how to get all the students in the group involved. You can do this by giving each student materials needed to solve the question at hand. This way everyone is part of the solution and everyone is needed to help figure out the problem. We have mentioned similar things in my LLT class about how to get those non-native speakers into group discussions, and not leave them feeling left out each time they get into small groups.
I have not seen this type of problem solving in my first grade classroom. I would be really interested to see how my students react to having each student holding some of the materials needed to solve the problem. This type of group work could be a good possibility for one of my lesson plans for this semester. It is really important that students learn at a young age how to properly participate and involve everyone in small group times.
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It is important for the entire group to understand what is going on. Our class does not even get into small groups very often, but they do have a lot of whole class learning. While doing this there are so many kids that are just not with it. There are also the same kids raising their hands and answering the questions every time. I feel like this has just become okay with everyone in the class, so those who do not always know the answer tend to not raise their hands even if they do. I think the ones that always know have just taken over the class and it seems like they might be the only ones succeeding. The teacher is always praising them for their work and kind of looks down on the rest. This has become a problem because the confidence level of everyone else seems to have dropped.
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