Learning from Teaching Cases Summary

Monday - Friday, July 6 - 10, 2009

Monday, July 6, 2009
Participants: Dianna; Sara; Katie; Dawn; Dave; Jenni; Kathy; Nicole. Mary Jo was ill today.

Agenda:
  • Smartness Inventory
  • Discussion of Cohen reading
  • Where's the 10?
  • Discness Task

We took a "Smartness Inventory" and gathered are continued thoughts regarding Status so we could continue or discussion.

We continued our discussion about Status - We were assigned to have read Chapters 3 and 8 of Elizabeth Cohen's Designing Groupwork by last Friday. We began the discussion on Friday. Sara facilitated our continued discussion. We made a list of ideas we felt we important to status, questions we had about status and ended by defining Status.

Next we worked individually on a task titled; "Where's the 10?" Dave shared his strategy for counting 10 and Dawn showed an alternative way to show 10. Once we felt we had a handle on the task we watched a video of a group working on the same task. While watching the video we were asked to document EVIDENCE of: High Status and Low Status behavior and of Status interventions. When the video was done we shared evidences of Status and made predictions of what we thought would happen among the group on the next task. We will start here tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Participants: Dianna; Sara; Katie; Dawn; Dave; Jenni; Kathy; Nicole. Mary Jo joined us by phone.

Today in the case study working group we began by watching the second half of a video we discussed on Monday. We focused on observing academic and social status of students working in a group. During our discussion of the video we also reflected on what kinds of comments fit into the lens we were attempting to use. After that we began to brainstorm ideas for our group's final product. Our ideas included observation tools, a lesson skeleton on how to introduce the idea of multiple abilities, a list of guidelines used to identify a multiple abilities task, a resource list of where to find math tasks that fit our guidelines.

Thursday, July 9, 2009
Participants: Dianna; Sara; Katie; Dawn; Dave; Jenni; Kathy; Nicole; Mary Jo.

Agenda:
  • Discness
  • Final Decision on Project

Broke into groups and worked on the Discness Task.

Did a gallery walk of each others' Task poster.

Discussed differences and similarities in the Task.

Made more final decisions about project.

Friday, July 10, 2009
Participants: Dianna; Sara; Katie; Dawn; Dave; Jenni; Kathy; Nicole; Mary Jo.

We spent the first part of our meeting participating in the Lesson Study group's practice lesson. The lesson had these ideas like these:

  1. What type of n-sided polygons will tile a plane?
  2. The interior vertices of the polygons, no matter what size, add up to 360 degrees.

Once we finished the lesson study experience, we broke apart into groups and worked on our projects. We have two teams: an observation tools team and a multiple abilities/resources list team.

Back to Journal Index