As I'm working with W on adding and subtracting integers, I feel good because I like helping. I try to ask questions to help her understand her strategy, and not give her the answers. For instance: "How do you subtract a negative?" I realized yesterday that I have probably helped her too much because as I went around the room checking students' understanding on a review worksheet, she grabbed my wrist and "no, you can't leave me." Oops!
I have told the students during instruction that they need to find the best learning tool for them and work with that. We have shown them several different analogies for working with positive and negative numbers, and given them time to practice with black & red chips, hot & cold cubes, black & red cards, gaining and losing yards in a football game, but it still seems that students will see an equation and jump to an answer without thinking about what it means. I don't want to tell them the answer, but I'm confused on how to scaffold the learning process. After we taught a lesson that a negative times a negative equals a positive, I asked them to solve -3 + -8 (with emphasis on the +) and had several students enthusiastically respond +11!
Edie,
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if this would help, but have you thought about taking some time to explain how as the students progress into more sophisticated math, what becomes more important is their understanding of the process, and not their answer? I still see this preference for "did I get the right answer?" especially in our honors students. I have been trying to counter this by asking students how they feel about their thinking. The nice thing about groups is I can say, "Do you think you understand what you did? Does it seem like you did it correctly? Do the other people in your group have a similar result?" If they say yes to all of these, then I sometimes ask them why they still feel like they need me to come over and verify their answer.
So far they don't really have an answer to that last question. I think I am going to start telling them that when I ask that question it usually means that I am feeling uncertain about myself, and that if what they really need is assurance, I can provide that without just telling them the answer. Someday they will be doing work where there is no answer key available, and they will need to have confidence in their ability to evaluate their own work.