Chalk Talk

Class tonight was very enlightening.  Jill and Ann did an amazing job with their presentations.

I was glad that Jill was able to apply what she is learning in class to something practical for the classroom with her advance organizer.  I could not believe that I drew a complete blank and took forever to come up with a story!  Yeesh…I look forward to trying this strategy in my classroom with upcoming geometry lessons or with methods of how to solve different types of algebraic equations.  I might also use it in an application with different types of graphs (bar, circle, line, box-and-whisker) and why/when you would use a particular display.

Ann’s lesson on cognitive inquiry and discovery learning really intrigued me.  I have only had bad experiences with this technique, but want to further investigate it and make it a successful component in my personal learning theory paper.  I think it is an excellent way for students to learn, but you need to find a decent balance of ensuring the presence of prerequisite knowledge but not giving too much information so that students aren’t really discovering the concepts on their own.  I think this will be a great way for students to develop alternative algorithms for subtraction.