Encouraging Students to Follow the What if Moments

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Encouraging Students to Follow the What if
Moments

• Jeffrey Bratcher
• BMCC

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• The part of the PTLT training that interests me
  most is the process of helping students become
  study partners.
• The most frustrating part of my experience has
  been difficulty getting students to explore the
  material more fully, to ask questions not
  explicitly in the homework.
• I found a number of articles and sites
  concerning techniques for drawing students out.
  They gave examples of techniques that included
• focused repetition,
• teacher modeling of behavior,
• and the use of the phrase I dont know after a
  students asks What if.

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Focused Repetition

• This is a technique of repeating student
  questions after they ask them and encouraging to
  use this technique with each other.
• Sometimes you pause half way through the
  question, to encourage them to re word it or to
  get a quiet partner to fill in the blank.

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Teacher Modeling

• This is a technique of using the thinking
  techniques you want students to emulate
• For instance, do not always answer a question
  right away. Think about it and try working
  through it from different angles, until one of
  them seems to work the best.
• This shows them how to do it themselves later,
  and not thinking that, Hes just really smart at
  this.

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Following the What If moment

• This is a technique of following the students
  lead after a pointed question, instead of getting
  right back onto the next problem or saving it
  until the end of the class when we have more
  time.
• Say I dont know to allow the student to take
  over for themselves.
• Allow the students time to explore a new issue,
  even if sometimes it means not covering all the
  problems.

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• All of these techniques reinforced the material I
  have learned here. I resolved to use these
  techniques more fully in my next class. My
  hypothesis was that by using these techniques I
  would be able to coax students into allowing
  themselves to ask questions not on the worksheet,
  and give them the time to explore those issues.
• I was looking for a specifically for a What if
  moment, where students feel engaged in the
  material and want to know more than what is
  required of them on the lesson plan.

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• Let me tell you about one such moment in my
  workshop. We had been learning how to turn
  repeating decimals into a fraction. Here is a
  typical example of that process.

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100x 35.35 x .35 99x 35.00
x 35/99

• 0.35 equal 35/100
• but what is 0.3535 ?
• Here is the traditional approach.

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• The short cut is to look at the first place
  holder that a repeating group ends on, (say the
  hundredth place), put just the repeating digits
  (without the decimal) over that placeholder minus
  one.
• Say its .3535 , thats a 35 group to the 100th
  placeholder, so 35 over 100 minus 1, becomes
  35/99.

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• The what if moment came when a student asked,
  What if only the only number to repeat started
  in the 100th place, instead of both number
  repeating, that is to say
• .355 instead of .3535

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• I thought about it for a minute.
• I could have said, I will find out and get back
  to you next week. We have a lot of ground to
  cover and I want to make sure I cover the
  worksheet fully.
• Then I realized that this was the perfect
  opportunity to veer off the worksheet and allow
  the students space to explore the topic more
  fully.
• and said those magic words I was taught to say

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• I dont know, why dont we try to figure it out
  together.
• And thats when the students became study
  partners.

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100x 35.55 x .35 99x ???
x

• We tried the traditional way.

But no one one was sure how to subtract .55
repeating from .355
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100x 35.55 10x 3.55 90x 32.00 x
32/90

• One group tried putting all the repeating 5s
  behind the decimal. We tried 100x and 1 x. Then
  we tried

But we were not sure if that was the right way
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100x 5.55 10x .55 90x 5.0 x
5/90 3/10 x (527)/90 x
32/90

• Another group tried taking out the .3 (or
  3/10) and only working with the.055 and adding
  the 3/10ths later.

Still we were not sure if that was the right way
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100x 35.55 x .35 99x 35.2 x
352/990 x 32/90

• And another thought they could finally use the
  traditional way.

Then and only then were they prepared to believe
that they had in fact mastered the process!
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• In conclusion, my experience has shown that it is
  sometimes more important to allow students room
  to go off on a tangent than to always finish
  every point on the worksheet. There are some
  materials that must be covered, but there must
  also be time to explore a particular topic more
  fully. We need to encourage in students a sense
  of ownership over the learning process. In this
  way we will help students become self motivated
  learners.

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Bibliography

• The Language Teacher, volume 18, number 7, July
  1994, published by the Japan Association for
  Language Teaching http//www.esl-lab.com/research/
  question.htm
• Getting Students to Ask Questions (video),
  http//www.pbs.org/teachersource/scienceline/morto
  n1.shtm
• Getting Them To Speak Up! Questioning Skills to
  Promote Discussion, http//www.utc.edu/Units/Wal
  kerTeachingResourceCenter/FacultyDevelopment/Quest
  ioning/