We gathered with teachers from our school board from Kindergarten to Grade 8 to discuss the results of the Car Caravan Math Task. Here is an account of our findings.
What struck you?
- Students seemed very frustrated they couldn't just apply one formula
- students not used to open ended questions and seemed overwhelmed
- Need to narrow down the wondering in order to be able to tackle it and move forward
- Teachers also at times frustrated that students were not thinking deeply and not producing questions or taking the problem very far.
- Some teachers were surprised that some ESL students were very engaged and using math language to talk about the colours and the proportional language used : ex. more than
- The task was so open it pushed us to think about what we were documenting and pushed us to think about how we question students and focus on presenting more open-ended questions.
- Teachers found students were debating a lot and had trouble working in groups and collaborating.
What are the big ideas we discovered by presenting this problem?
- Big idea: Getting students to justify their thinking. Often the questions used were:
- How do you know?
- Can you prove it to me?
- Are you sure?
- Students ended up first trying to use strategies and concepts that were taught in the previous couple weeks.
- Learning context has a huge impact on the students. Some important questions to ponder prior to planning to help focus on educators’ intentions:
- Are we letting them struggle with a problem or giving them the strategies too quickly?
- What kind of student groupings will be best?
- Are we providing materials that are consistent?
- Ex. on the computer it may look different than when it is printed.
- How does the environment affect their wonderings?
- Ex. The lighting
Kindergarten Small Group Discussion:
- Difficulty getting out the math until educator seemed to find the right questions
- Ex. It`s race track! If it`s a race track , which one is winning?
- Some KG students talked about cars, colours, it`s a rug.
- Lots of talk about what the picture represented.
- Some noticed the background first.
- They were trying to figure out what it was versus wondering
- Focus on colours: ex. 2 shades of blue
- Some discussion about shape
- Teacher asked : Are there a lot of car? - provoked their thinking about what is a big number. One student remarked that they would need to “count fast” - and he started to count by 10s.
- Asking questions was challenging for the teacher because the students went on many tangents in their discussion and it was hard to bring them back and focused.
Kindergarten discussions after viewing Students' work from K-8:
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- You could see all the strands covered across all the grades
- The problem could be presented at the beginning of the year and brought back again to ask other questions and reach other strategies
- EQAO years – affect their answers and wonderings
- We heard other teachers commenting on kindergarten inquiries saying that in Kindergarten it seems to be more of an exploration
- Noticed how kindergarten students were drawn to colours but that math can be integrated later
What would you do differently?
- Some of us wanted to rethink the questions we were using to figure out how to draw out more math
- Need to MODEL more mathematical wonderings
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