Back to School...

Sorry for no post last week, but it was Spring Break for my school system.  Got around to cleaning out my inbox and found some new videos from the Teaching Channel.  Although there were several that were of interest, I was most excited to find one that goes along with what we're trying to improve at my school -  collaboration among our students.  We have discovered that our students don't truly know how to collaborate!  When we say you may work with a partner, they really don't know what that means.  So the instructional coach and I are working to help the teachers improve the collaboration in their classrooms.  The video that I watched was called Improving Participation with Talk Moves.  In the video, the teacher describes several "Talk Moves" that her students use during a class discussion.  I hope to share the video with my math teachers at our next data meeting.  We have already viewed several videos from the book Classroom Discussions:  Seeing Math Discourse in Action by Anderson, Chapin, and O'Connor  which is also a great resource to use to begin to make changes in collaboration among our students.  Be sure to check out the Teaching Channel in general - lots of great ideas and great teachers in action!
Picture of book from Amazon.