What's happening in 6th grade?
In short, we are living in a time unlike any other. The country and world have succomb to COVID-19. All schools are out. Our nation is taking the necessary precautions in order to protect thousands of Americans at risk by shutting down "non-essential" businesses and schools across the nation. What better time to reflect?! How were things going?Before the craziness, there was a lot going on in Room 314! Remember? Earlier this year, we dove into self-paced learning in the classroom! Many good things have been happening! In this journey, many students have been empowered to learn at their own pace in the classroom! (No - students, when working independently through materials, are not parusing Youtube!) Through instructional videos and formative & summative assessments, students are showing mastery of the content. Students have shown great ownership as they are working through working their way through modules. I have stuck with with Google Classroom as our home base for self-paced instruction for a while, based on student feedback. Another important change is that I am now teaching BOTH fifth grade math classes in our school. I introduced self-paced learning to the other group as well soon after becoming their teacher experiencing similar successes. One continued concern I have is prioritizing... DEPTH OVER BREADTHMy students have been excelling in the assessments that are provided by the school-chosen curriculum. They have done well on benchmark assessments! They were making significant headway in being very prepared for the PSSA testing. (Not sure that is going to happen at this point!) Still, there is not as much depth of knowledge as I want! With the pressure to perform on benchmark assessments, and having covered the "scope and sequence" in order to be prepared for the benchmark assessments, there is is little time to really go in depth with any topic (despite knowing best practices). With an amazing group of learners this year, we are only "on target" with the scope and sequence. (This did not happen last year. There were many more diverse learners! We needed more time with some skills and concepts.) I get it... I get it... What's your point?One of my goals is to build in more opportunity for depth of knowledge throughout the year - especially for those who are self-paced. Spiraling concepts while learning new concepts provides depth (more than I realized last year), but I want to introduce authentic mathematical tasks or projects that challenge my students to use the mathematical concepts in the real-world throughout the year - not as an end-of-the-year enrichment. No - a real-world word problem is not enough. (I mean... word problems like, "Mr. Soper has 1/2 pot of soup left. He divides it among he and four friends. What fraction of the pot will each get?" get really old!!) My goal, most likely for the next year given the craziness of the end of this year, is to build in authentic tasks to build a depth (over breadth) of knowledge throughout the course of the year. Afterall... Depth over breadth.
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About MeLouie here! 5th Grade Teacher. Level 2 Google Educator. Love all things Google. 1:1 Chromebooks. Archives
June 2020
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