“Clearly the choice of task depends on what you want the students to learn…When objectives are conceptual rather than routine, you will want to find or create a rich multiple ability task: a task with a wider range of intellectual abilities than conventional school tasks (Cohen, Ch 5, pg. 67-68).”
This quote from the readings reminded me of how important it is for students to know why they are working on something. Especially in math, it is the one subject where you can constantly hear students asking or whispering about why they need to learn this or what the point of the activity is. During my time of really observing and getting to know the students and the classroom, I noticed how often he would say “the point of this lesson is…” or “I want you to be able to …after the completion of this lesson”. That was something that even my field instructor commented on, that the students always know what the objective is during his lessons.
The students work a lot in groups in math, and science. The groups change, but they were initially created based on the assessment given the 1st week of class. They really work well and I believe this is mostly because of the way classroom expectations were set up at the beginning of the semester. They were consistently talked about for a week and situations and expectations for working in groups were talked about in depth.
This week our topic in math was place value, each pair of students were given a sheet of paper and dice. They would take turns rolling and recording numbers and then putting them in respected places on the worksheet ultimately making a number in the millions. Each group would create different numbers, there was more than one correct answer, and it involved taking turns so that one member was not dominating and doing all the work. The children really understood their role and work well in pairs and small groups, and I think a major reason is because they know why they are doing it and what is expected from the teachers.
I also think it is important for students to understand the objectives of the lessons. My classroom uses groupwork throughout the day multiple times. The students really work well in group settings and it is because the students understand the expectations like in your classroom. I think this just shows that what you set as expectations in the beginning are so important because they set the stage for your classroom for the rest of the year. One assignment I observed was in science. They split up into groups and were given directions on how to complete the experiment which involved a student holding a yellow circle (sun) in one area of the class, one student measuring the distance, and one student recording what the diameter of the "sun" appeared to be. I thought this type of groupwork was great because each student picked a job they were responsible for but had to work together to put all the pieces together. In this case, the teacher gave directions but waited until everyone was done to see what they discovered. I think it would have taken away from the exploring aspect if she would have said in the beginning "the objective is to learn that the farther away you are the smaller something appears". I think that for some exploring activities it is better to allow them to explore on their own and then guide them back at the end to what your objective was.
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