Note: The link is fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
There is much to be learned from the gifted.
Clueless Mom, a licensed math teacher, is always learning new things from her mathematically gifted nine year old, with whom she seems to now be nearly neck and neck in the area of deep problem solving up to Algebra.
After solving an SAT question with her son by means of group effort (that is, the two of them putting their heads together), CM offers some preliminary observations about group problem solving in school.
They are not hard and fast conclusions--only some out-loud thinking.
Read Group Problem Solving on Clueless Mom of Gifted Kid's blog.
"Read Group Problem Solving on Clueless Mom of Gifted Kid's blog."
ReplyDeleteWhen I try to go to the blog I get this:
This blog is open to invited readers only
Is his a glitch or on purpose?
Out loud thinking is the BEST.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to drill this into myself...I keep coming across the importance of "thinking out loud" or even just "talking out loud" in diverse places.
I'll post as I get to it...
In any case, we are going to try to build up a "habit' of doing mental math - and mental everything else - around here.
ReplyDeleteI have the same problem as anonymous - I can't access the site!
ReplyDeleteI also have the same problem -I can't access the site either. I get the message that the blog is open to invited readers only.
ReplyDeleteClueless Mom here. I fixed the link. How clueless of me. It works now.
ReplyDeleteMy primary school teacher was very good at getting ourselves to work together. Even for the students who were uninterested in mathematics, she made out of the box questions (e.g. not the style you would find in the PSLE) and they were always interesting enough to work on them.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem with group work is that you give work to be done in "groups" that are tedious or ask questions like, "predict what will happen in C." This makes students very jaded and uninspired to continue.
The other issue is preventing students from merely doling out different problems to various students, in place of working together on each problem.
Given that the groups you were assigned tended to last the whole term (save for teacher discernment in reorganising students), there was a lot of incentive to cooperate.
I tend to agree with CM's comment about group problem solving working best when levels of competence are well matched. That seems to fit my recollection working through problems on the white board as an engineer. Of course, it was also helpful for many real world situations to have a collection of different strengths in the discussion. A software guru teamed with a circuit designer and a linguist, for example, worked well to spec out a speech processing system. While they all had specific expertise, they were all also good enough generalists to understand what each other were proposing.
ReplyDeleteCM's specific SAT problem leant itself especially well to their group approach because it had a diagram. It is always good to mark up a diagram with whatever you know. Some of it will be irrelevant to the specific question, but putting it on the paper may supply the puzzle piece that is needed--whether a group or and individual is trying to solve the problem. Whether you are dealing with polygons inscribed in circles or parallel lines cut by transversals or any other geometric situations, if the path to the solution is not obvious, just mark up the diagram with whatever you can figure out. Then you--or a teammate--may see how to get to the answer.
Dan K.