growing_rectangles_intro.ppt |
Off we went and, as you would expect, the I.T completely failed. We couldn’t access the site through the laptops, some pupils could through their phones but mostly we had to share my laptop around the class.
The same happened on the second lesson.
Even with this set back I would say this was the best this lesson has ever gone and the benefits of using the Wiki were crystal clear from the first night. If you don’t currently use them, my advice is start now.
structure their work, listen to advice but genuinely struggle to ‘go it alone’. I let them. At the end of the lesson I take photo’s of samples of work, put them on the Wiki that night. Homework is to log on, ask a question, and answer one.
Pupils put posts in the wrong places (as I did when I started), ask very closed questions initially (as I did when I started teaching) and then someone asks ‘Can you make a rectangle with the same area as perimeter’ and suddenly were off. Pupils are
going on at 10:00 at night to try and get to the bottom of it, messaging their frustrations and, without realising, clearly defining their
misconceptions.
From that point my lesson plan was out the window, my lesson on number patterns and algebra had been railroaded by the pupils who I could see were clearly stuck on the concept of area and perimeter.
We then reviewed the photo’s of the work from lesson 1, pupils
could clearly see where work had gone well, we could model a good piece of work, offer constructive feedback and off we went again. Pupils were all keen to have photos of their work taken and put a lot more effort into producing something to go on the Wiki.
This time pupils were able to better organise themselves, had a clearer idea of how to structure their work and all produced a stepped investigation of their own design.
Homework – use the Wiki – ask a question/ answer a question.
We then got a post asking 'How do you work out the area of a Circle?
Terms like Radius, Diamter, Circumference and Pi appear on the radar. One reply was ‘You can’t, a circle only has one side so there is nothing to times it by’. I’d never thought about this before, it made sense but was clearly an error.
This was the starter question for the next lesson. I was expecting pupils to argue that it must have area because it takes up space but to my surprise they mostly agreed with the logic. These pupils tell me they understand area, when I ask them about
their understanding they can describe the area as the space inside a shape, when given questions they can work out areas of simple shapes, they jump through all the hoops, say all the right things but a question raised by one of their peers
clearly shows they don’t understand area at all. They just know all the right answers to the same questions. Following this single statement we spent a lesson drilling down into definitions and making sure everyone understood all the terms mentioned on the Wiki. Pupils were engaged because they had discovered both the terms being discussed and their own misconceptions. My original lesson was an investigation based on Algebra, the pupils had thrown this out of the window and remained focused on Perimeter and Area. We unpicked a lot of the details that in the past I had taken for granted as being understood.
Through the Wiki we have moved from circles onto cylinders and surface area has recently reared it's head. Pupils drive the interest, I provide the resources and pick out the points to present in class. The Wiki still doesn’t work properly in class, but it has raised over 100 discussion points in 1 week with in excess of 300 views (in a closed community of 25 pupils). Pupils are on from as early as 8:00 in the morning to past 10:00 at night. We are now looking at broader questions. Below are a couple of examples.
What Questions would you ask?