Blog #3

Classroom Discussions - Chapter 9

This whole chapter is about effective lesson planning. The four components for a good lesson plan would be identifying the mathematical goals, anticipating confusion, asking questions, and planning the implementation. After talking about each of these tools, the chapter delves into a lesson that a teacher has made according to the knowledge she has about her students. The chapter also takes into consideration the improvisations a teacher may need to make based on the way the lesson is going.

Kazemi - Discourse That Promotes Conceptual Understanding

This article is about two classrooms that were observed and studied to see what the classroom norms were, attitudes towards math, and overall math learning in the two classrooms. Both teachers had different teaching styles although they were both exhibiting similar actions (i.e. praising correct answers, probing further into the math) but with different strategies.

Putting the Umph into Discussions- Stein

This article is about moving away from teacher led classroom discussions but more into student led classroom discussions. There are certain questions that a teacher may ask that leads the students in class to pay attention to certain important details and what their classmates are saying- as in actually processing and thinking about the classmates ideas as opposed to just listening and not understanding. This is going to lead the students to not rely on the teacher to give the answer as much but to work through the problems as a productive class.