Monday, 25 February 2013

Scrapping my own lesson midway through a class: Killing Silence

The lesson began alright.  Students were finishing up a sticky note activity from the previous day where they have to identify mistakes AND demonstrate how to fix the problem by putting it on a sticky.  They then have to put it on the back of the chart paper.  I can probably write a long post about this activity in terms of assessment, but I won't get into that right now.  Here's a quick picture of what I'm talking about, though:


Ok now onto what I am actually talking about...

I spent a while making a relevant worksheet package to prepare for Wednesday.  In Canada, it's Pink Shirt Day, which is a day dedicated to anti-bullying.
Pink Shirt Day

Here's the worksheet.

I didn't actually create the worksheet.  It's basically a modified version of an existing optimization activity.

Everything was going ok... except for one thing.  They were too quiet.  I didn't like this.  I know they were just trying to work through the worksheet, but I was bored of quiet.  Jonathan Newman recently blogged about getting a quiet class to talk.  I thought about Jonathan, and I thought, "Hey, why not just scrap this part of today's lesson and make a new activity."

So I went and grabbed some string, chopped up 7 so they are the same size, and told them to try to enclose the biggest area possible with the string.  It is essentially the same activity on the worksheet... except they actually get to play with it.

So yup, that's what I did.  Didn't like the silence so I replaced it with noise.  Good constructive noise.

And it was great



I even had kids trying to stretch out the string to try to get the most out of their string:


Needless to say... that group got the best area... Healthy dose of cheating to go with a healthy amount of competition :)

The kids got to go up to the board and put up the numbers that they got.

So in any case... I guess I am somewhat recommending going with the flow and scrapping your lessons when you feel like it?

All this really came out of me seeing a ball of string in the corner of my room...

So maybe another thing I learned is that I should look around the room more?
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous25 February 2013 at 20:36

    That's awesome! I should totally start looking in the corners of my room more often.

    Yeah, I rarely have the guts to change my lesson mid-class that drastically, but I have drastically changed the course of a unit between any two days either because I didn't like where it was going, or (even better), I saw that "ball of string in the corner of the room".

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  2. Jimmy Pai27 February 2013 at 12:21

    Ok, I exaggerated a bit when I said the corner of the room. It made it sound dirty and messy... I meant a shelf.

    I actually change around my lessons mid-class quite often. Sometimes I have a good idea as to what to change it into... other times it doesn't turn out so well. But I'm sure all teachers do this to some degree. We use formative assessment to slightly change what we consolidate after an activity. We take up major ideas that students come up with that are innovative, in-the-right-direction, completely-tangential...etc. I think in terms of change the direction of the class, it just depends on how much you want to flow with it. It's easy to change the stream of water coming out of a faucet, but it's a lot different when it's the flow of water through a river. Not a completely thought-out analogy... but you get the idea.

    Thanks for the response!

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