COOPERATIVE LEARNING GROUPS

(Required Blog)

Friday I experienced my second really tough lesson in a row. As we approach the end of the summer, the material is getting more complex. The Algebra problems are requiring more and more steps, and the students seem to sometimes give up in the middle of a long problem even though they may be on the right track. I think the students are no longer experiencing that satisfying feeling of completing a problem and being confident that it is right. They have a lack of confidence in what they're doing when a problem is very long, and due to the many steps, the likelihood of calculation errors and other mishaps increases tremendously.

Friday's lesson was on solving systems of linear equations using substitution. I gave the students a handout with all the steps and an example of how the steps are used to solve a problem. I went over several examples. When I allowed the students to try problems on their own, the majority of the students had problems with fractions, and therefore were not even able to complete all the steps. I tried to do a review of adding and subtracting fractions, but I don't think it was very helpful given its brevity. I was at a loss for what to do. I could do a million examples on the board, but it was up to them to try problems and practice in order for them to be able to do the problems on a test.

Given the students' lack of confidence on this concept, I was hesitant about whether to do the activity I had planned, but I decided to try it out anyway. I paired the students up and distributed an instruction sheet including directions for a "role-play" in which one student would be the "substitute teacher" who would teach the other student ("the class") a lesson on solving systems of linear equations using substitution. The two students would then switch roles. I paired the best students with the students who could use some extra help and required that the better performing students teach the lesson first. I thought the exercise would force the students to learn the steps for using substitution, since my experience has been that teaching a concept to someone helps me to understand the concept better myself. Earlier in the summer, I think this exercise would have worked well. However, due to the complexity of the lesson, the activity was a bust.

Either the students were not reading the instructions given to them, or my instructions were not as clear as I thought they were. I fielded several questions about what each student was supposed to be doing. Also, it took so long for the "substitute teachers" to work the example problem on their paper, that they never got around to coming to the board to teach "the class" the lesson.

Because of all the questions I received as I monitored the groups, I ended up scrapping the group work and working the problems on the board. I could tell by the students' responses when I asked what steps I should take next to work the problems that their difficulties were not with the steps for using the substitution method, but simply with the calculations. I even asked them directly what they were having trouble with, and they confirmed that they were having problems performing the calculations accurately.

The students are good at working together in pairs or groups, but I think this activity would have been more effective after the students had a chance to work several problems and gain some confidence about what they were doing.