Elements of a lesson that promotes effective classroom management:
- Opener
- Academic goal is useful, clear, able to be evidenced, and accomplished
- ABCD: Audience, Behavior, Condition, Degree
- Know where it fits into the rest of the class
- Even “Skill-and-Drill” work should be scaffolded with good explanations of why (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 133). This lets students be more fluent.
- Engages all students
- Connects to student interests and cultures
- Group work
- Elicits and builds on student responses
- The “initial encoding” of the new concept is multi-faceted
- Student participation
- Including speaking. Speaking is a form of thinking.
- Gives the students choices
- Deals with student misconceptions
- Closer/Metacognition
http://www.mathalicious.com/lessons/three-shots
In short, the linked lesson promotes effective classroom management because it is an engaging, real-world, interactive lesson. The lesson begins with watching a short, exciting clip from college basketball. A team is down by two points, and one player from the team takes a three-point shot right before the buzzer sounds. His shot misses. However, an opposing player fouls him, giving him three shots from the foul line. If he makes all three, his team wins. If he makes two, he’ll send the game to overtime. If he makes one or zero, his team loses.
Was it a good idea for the opposing team to foul him? Students explore probabilities in this engaging lesson. Before each of his three shots, students compute probabilities of all the different outcomes; the faster they do the math, the sooner they get to see the video of what happened next.
First of all, this lesson will encourage effective management because it has a clear purpose. Assuming the students were just learning independent and compounding probabilities, this lesson will dovetail neatly into their learning. This goal is clear from the start. Whether they’ve reached the goal will be clear as they are making probability calculations, answering questions based on those calculations, and answering “deepening understanding” questions at the end involving writing inequalities to generalize their answers.
This lesson lends itself to good opening and closing questions. Students can discuss at the beginning and end of the lesson whether the team should have fouled him and what other information they need make this decision. These activities will allow for the necessary scaffolding to take place, as well as metacognition, which will help the lesson be better remembered. This lesson should be very engaging for the students who are sports fans, because it connects math to their personal interests. It is also very visual and auditory, with the exciting clips interspersed throughout the lesson. These aspects will make the material more interesting and memorable for students, since it will be a multi-faceted, real-world memory.
The lesson itself leaves open how students will interact with the material. But, a teacher might have students in groups working to answer questions at each step. This would facilitate deeper interaction with the material. Also, talking about material is a different way of thinking about it. This lesson also gives students a powerful thing: choice (Fay & Funk, 1995, p. 143). They are choosing and predicting at multiple points along the journey. Choice should help them take more ownership of the project and entail less management issues.
References:
Fay, J. & Funk, D. (1995). Teaching with love and logic . Golden, CO: The Love
and Logic Press.
Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. (Expanded 2
nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.
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