Fishers Elementary
October/November
Instruction that Fosters Understanding
As we come off of our November 9 PD with Dr. Flessner and start thinking about our upcoming December staff meeting's focus on inquiry, what success stories can we share? Are there elements of your instruction have shifted from a more traditional approach to instruction that fosters understanding? How does all of this fit in with new standards and new standardized tests?
I recently came across this passage: "It turns out that simply adding rigor to the school curriculum can actually cause achievement to go down unless other instructional factors change at the same time...New research shows that when students' curiosity is evoked in the classroom, their achievement rises significantly. Just making school harder is not enough; we also have to make school more interesting."
Allowing for Inquiry
Woodpecker = Inquiry
(disclaimer: mathematically a woodpecker does not equal inquiry!)
I Wonder...
Math Process Standards
PS.1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
PS.2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
PS.3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
PS.4: Model with mathematics.
PS.5: Use appropriate tools strategically.
PS.6: Attend to precision.
PS.7: Look for and make use of structure.
PS.8: Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.