Calculators are used during entire lesson.
No behavior management problems. Students worked throughout the class period.
Make sure you wait until you have students attention before you give directions.
I'm not sure why this happened. It seems obvious that you shouldn't give directions to a group that isn't paying attention but I tried to anyway. I guess I was thinking that the directions would get their attention but that is definitely a bad way to get attention.
Started with quick pre-class work which was reviewed.
Randomly placed students in groups to complete worksheet. Students given quiz at the end and told groups their grade would be the average of the group.
I don't really like random groups but strategically placing students in groups is a lot of work which I am not yet prepared to do. I think it is important that I get better at the more fundamental aspects of teaching before I try to develop the more intermediate ideas.
Moved around classroom and worked with different group, answering questions.
Questions on worksheet are open ended and students need to use critical thinking skills to respond.
The worksheet was what I call guided discovery. The questions lead the students to develop the concepts of the lesson. In this case the concepts were properties of logarithmic functions. No group was able to independently derive the general form of any of the properties. I had to walk each group through the process of how to go from data to patterns to relationship to general formula. On one hand, it is disappointing that the students weren't able to see it but on the other, this is exactly what I mean when Italk about modeling critical thinking. I believe that if this activity is done enough then the students will eventually learn how to do this independently.
Good interaction between students in groups.
Most students were actively engaged and stayed on task during the entire class period.
Able to informally assess student understanding of concepts.
Would have been helpful to go over directions of quiz together - before they started. May have wanted to review worksheet with class and then given quiz.
The problem was that there just wasn't enough time for this activity to really sink in. I took the advice of some who said that my first activity was loaded with concepts and I cut down to the fundamental concepts. These students' critical reasoning ability is so under developed that they couldn't be adequately guided through these concepts during a full class period even when they were working at a phenomenal level.
(A) excellent B good C satisfactory D fair F poor
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