Reflections on Conferring

Conferring is purposeful helping aimed at developing students' capacity for learning. Conferring is more than merely providing information. I think of it like this: 

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day (helping)

Teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime (conferring)

I taught a lesson about conferring recently with my pre-service mathematics teachers. Here's what we did, how it went, what I'll change for next time, and what we learned.

TT-TNG (F14 edition)

Teaching Tips (from) The Next Generation

Presenting the inaugural edition of... Teaching Tips (from) the Next Generation: a summary of semester-end blog posts written by graduating secondary math teachers at Grand Valley State University.

They share their greatest areas of personal growth and their most powerful teaching strategies from their recently completed student teaching experiences.

• Mr. Snyder: http://snydermathgv.wordpress.com
• Mr. Burdick: http://mitchellburdick.blogspot.com 
• Ms. Jamison: http://learningtoteachorteachingtolearn.blogspot.com
• Ms. Rickard: http://lovetoteachgv.wordpress.com
• Mr. Taylor: http://dataylor92.wordpress.com 

(I will continue to add more as they come in. Last update: 12/1/14 at 12:55pm)

Quadrilateral Hierarchies - Productive Struggle

An overarching goal for the semester is to help my pre-service teachers grow more comfortable with "productive struggle" and with persevering on challenging tasks. We worked at it for a long time earlier this semester on problems like the Chessboard Problem, the Cheesecake Task, and many others.

Last week, we moved into Geometry. After spending some time exploring the Van Hiele levels of geometric thought and the kinds of activities that help children progress to higher levels, it was time to put their own geometry knowledge to the test.

In this two-stage lesson, I first divided the class into five teams (of four) and assigned each team a shape class: rectangles, kites, rhombuses, parallelograms, trapezoids (inclusive definition). They were directed to produce a poster with a 2x2 grid with space for examples and properties of general and special members of their shape class.

Here's an example: