Things Accomplished to Date

As a group, we have been working on improving classroom discourse in the mathematics and science classrooms. In the first two sessions of working together, we discussed what was working in classrooms and where we needed help. One way we decided to help ourselves see what students were discussing and how they were discussing it, was to create a rubric to monitor student discussion. After creating the rubric, we were each supposed to try it in class. While I think most of us did try it, we were not really sure how to work on moving students to higher levels on the rubric. Kristin tried using the notes to have students discuss questions that should be asked about packets. Melissa worked on monitoring student discussion through the use of sticker charts and sentence starters. Talia also used incentive charts to monitor vocabulary use. Kate used jigsaw discussions initially, seeing the importance of sentence starters and prompts in student-based discussions.