Putting Reading into Practice

I taught my first math lesson today. I stood up in front of 15 fourth graders (I know, small class) and stayed there for an hour teaching perimeter and area of rectangles. It was exciting, fun and nothing like I imagined. I feared students asking questions I would not know the answers too. In fact, I even wrote out and solved every example I planned to use so I didn't actually have to do the math off the top of my head. Don't judge :) Although, the most interesting part of my experience was seeing the way the lesson I planned played out and what perspective my students had on it.

Based on our readings and discussions in our math methods classes I tried to create my lesson around these ideas: do not say anything that students can say and use questioning techniques to guide student responses to the correct answers you are looking for. I used these ideas in what was a review of perimeter and area. From my perspective the students were engaged, gave lots of answers and asked questions. I rarely answered a student's questions on my own; in fact I tried to see if another student could answer it for their peer. This allowed students to show me what they knew while explaining a potential challenging idea to another student. When it seemed like a dew students were confused about the same question, I took that moment to explain the idea on my own. Although, again, I did not do this often.

After the lesson my partner, the teacher and the students all gave me feedback. The students specifically said that they noticed I did not answer many of their questions on my own. I could not tell if they brought this to my attention because they thought I did not know the answers or if they did not like this style of teaching. This made me wonder…if we are going to teach with this new constructivist view on math, how do we anticipate how students will respond? Should we slowly introduce this type of teaching or go all out and talk through our own reasons for teaching this way? In my experience these students I taught today are used to the teacher taking more of a direct teaching approach, where he tells his students exactly how to use the new mathematical method they are learning.