For this week’s blog I’d actually like to reflect on the first “creative teaching strategy” that I tried out-- way back at the end of September. At the time I considered it a total failure-- for reasons that I will explain shortly. I return to the experience now because I’ve been thinking a lot about unit planning recently, and this early experience changed the way I use so-called ‘creative activities.
Ideally a unit plan should maximize content delivery, provide a lot of independent practice, attract and retain student interest, provide easily graded and logical assessment points... etc, etc, etc and the list goes on. The activities in that we’ve been practicing in our Content Methods class are a great way to get student interest and independent practice. However in general, they don’t for direct-instruction -- that is to say these activities are great for a 2nd day work period or a review lesson before a quiz but not always appropriate for the first instance where students are practicing a certain type of problem.
I learned this lesson the hard way. Our second full unit this year in Transitions was on polynomials and we started with a week of exponent rules practice. On wednesday of that week I could tell students were getting a bit restless with the notes and practice routine so I decided to shake it up and try the matching activity that Dani modeled for us in an early lesson. Her version had us sorting through stacks of colored cards creating piles that match a function table to its equation and graph. In mine, students had to match an exponent rules problem (eg. x^2 * x^3) to its expansion (x*x * x *x *x) and the relevant rule (multiply bases = add exponents).
Making the cards was quite a bit more time consuming than I expected-- mostly because of the cutting and assembling piles with the appropriate assortment of cards. I was happy with the product. In class however, everything that could go wrong did. To start with, my instructions were ineffective. I did have written instructions on the board that explained what each color card was and what each pile would look like in the end. The difficulty was that the kids didn’t know where to start and they quickly became rowdy and off-task.
In retrospect I think that the trouble was because 1) I didn’t adequately model the thinking process that they could use to assemble a pile and 2) they were not strong enough with the background skills (simplifying exponential expressions and writing the expansion of an exponential expression) to have the sort of recognitions that would help them see how different cards belonged together. I probably could have solved this had we done some straight forward simplifying practice before trying the activity.
To return to the question of unit planning and the appropriate placement for ‘creative teaching strategies’ the struggle is to have time to provide a strong enough foundation and practice before the activity. It’s as if for any given topic you need a day for instruction and then a whole additional day for the activity... but than I always feel pressured to simply move on to the next subject. I hope to continue to use creative activities but only after we have already learned and practiced the skills in a straightforward manner.
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