Lesson Connections

Lesson Objective

For my first formal observation, the learning objective for my lesson was to round decimals to the nearest hundredths place. We began the lesson by reviewing the exit ticket from yesterday, where students rounded decimals to the nearest tenth. We used a guided discourse for students to defend which student they agree with and why. 

After the warm up, we went through the rest of the lesson. Students learned to count by hundredths, organize their work by boxing the digits at and before the hundredths place, and we really stamped the idea of rounding up at and above the midpoint of five, and staying the same for four and below. 

Assessment

To assess their knowledge, we gave students an exit ticket that involved two opportunities to demonstrate if they can round numbers to the nearest hundredth place. Using these exit tickets after the lesson, we were able to see where students still had misunderstandings that we could restamp in the next day’s lesson. The form of assessment I used after the lesson was the following exit ticket: 

Exit Ticket Name: _________________________________

Task

This assessment was based on the tasks that we did during the lesson. As my clinical teacher often teaches with an “I do, we do, you do” model, the exit tickets often reflect tasks and problems that we model or do together as a class during the lesson. For example, this “we do” problem from our lesson was used to scaffold the organization to solve these problems, as well as to stamp rounding up versus staying the same. Using this task, after modeling solving the same type of problem, allowed students to get practice and support before being assessed on their exit ticket. 

Who My Students Are

The guided discourse slide above shows one way we plan around who our students are in the lesson. I know the majority of my students have collaboration as a strength and an interest, so giving them the opportunities to talk with their peers supports that. As a school, our goal for the year is to level up the discourse. I noticed in my site classroom that there was a lack of academic language throughout the first math unit. We were learning about place value, but there was a lack of vocabulary around place value. We decided to support students with a word bank, in addition to modeling and asking for specific mathematical vocabulary to encourage students using, and therefore learning, these vocabulary terms more intentionally. Overall, through a guided discourse, we planned to use collaboration as a strength to try to improve the growth area of students' academic language from my context for learning. 

Cognitive Demand and Language Demand

The lesson objective connects to language demands because students will be orally defending which student they agree with using mathematical language to their table. The objective connects to cognitive demands because it fits onto DOK level 2- skills and concepts- on Hess’s Math & Science Cognitive Rigor Matrix. Students are demonstrating understanding by specifying and explaining relationships using examples and non-examples of students from the previous day during the guided discourse. Students will be orally demonstrating their understanding during a turn-and-talk with their tablemates. 

Resources

When I lesson plan for math, I love to use the coherence map, which can be found here: Coherence Map. This helps connect standards through grade levels. It is an accessible tool that makes math standards easy to find. It also helps build lessons because you can see previously learned standards that may need to be retaught, or you may look ahead to challenge students who need extensions. 

My site professor introduced me to Love and Logic last year. It has many different ideas and resources, including a list of “one liners” to use with students.  I think it is a great website to use as a tool for classroom management. It can be found here: How to Create a Love and Logic Classroom.  

Although we do not use the same phrase as this article when writing learning objectives at my site school, I still believe it is a succinct and helpful resource to use when writing learning objectives. tips_for_writing_objectives.pdf

My site professor just shared this resource with me and I am excited to check it out: https://www.thecorestandards.org/other-resources/key-shifts-in-mathematics