All About Oneness @ Rumney School

Composite shapes are a prerequisite for our lesson on fractions.

It's a dreary, rainy Monday morning, but I'm still basking in the afterglow of a fabulous lesson study that I feel so lucky to have participated in this past Wednesday in first grade at Rumney School.  In this blog post, I will provide:

• An overview description of the lesson study.
• A fly on the wall perspective of the lesson.

If you're wondering: "What the heck is lesson study?"  You may want to check out this blog post first: Decimal Madness: Anatomy of a Lesson Study.

First grade teachers in WCSU will want to check out the changes to WCSU PI 1.7, the proficiency scale for a new performance indicator (WCSU PI 1.8) and the new June benchmark assessment.

Lesson Study Overview

After participating in a second grade lesson study in December, first grade teacher Ben Weiss was very enthusiastic about lesson study (enough so that he earned a quote in my "What's Lesson Study?" presentation).  When the opportunity came, he jumped at the chance to be the facilitating teacher of our most recent lesson study.

In the weeks before the lesson study, I had the opportunity to be in both Ben's class and Doty first grade teacher, Jen Frantz's class several times.  Similarly, the three of us spent a day doing a curriculum topic study centered on the concepts of fractions and shapes in first grade where we created a new proficiency scale and benchmark assessment for understanding fractions as equal parts of one whole (here's the agenda for that).

We have been having fun focusing on how to ride what I like to call "the retention wave" pictured above.  This graph comes from a great book by cognitive neuroscientist, David Sousa called How the Brain Learns Mathematics.  The idea is to design and time instructional activities to maximize retention of correct concepts and models.  We knew we wanted to incorporate this idea into our lesson study.  We also knew we wanted to focus on fractions as a concept.

What we noticed from class observations and formative assessment was that students were lacking flexibility in how they think about "oneness."  So we decided that an appropriate learning target would involve understanding the transcendence of "one half" and how it is defined by the "whole" to which it relates.  We also knew that we really wanted to focus on rich, precise and accessible math language.

On Wednesday, a group consisting of teachers from three schools (four first grade teachers, two second grade teachers, two kindergarten teachers), a speech and language pathologist, our director of curriculum (who started off the planning when I was sidelined by a flat tire - Thanks, Jen!) and me spent the day developing, observing and debriefing a first grade lesson.

• Here is a copy of our Lesson Study agenda.
• Here is a copy of the lesson we developed using backward design.

A Fly on the Wall Perspective

Ben gave me permission to video the lesson and share it with you.  This is not an expectation for a lesson study teacher, but it's a bonus, and I am very grateful.  My cinematography is a little Blair Witchy, but I hope you can get the gist of it... Enjoy!

In part one, Ben focuses on language building to make our lesson accessible:

In part two, Ben introduces the concepts of one whole and one half relating to different models:

In part three, students get the directions for our wholeness stations activity:

In part four, students start the station work:

In part five, students continue with the stations and explain their thinking:

In part six, Ben "closes out" the lesson, focusing on good examples of student thinking.

That's a Wrap!

It was a jam-packed, high energy day.  A little exhausting, but so worthwhile.  I want to thank all who participated.  It was an absolute pleasure to spend the day collaborating with you.  I think this was my favorite lesson study yet!