My inquiry plan is focused on student engagement. This, to me, is one of the most important aspects of teaching. A teacher can know the content, have perfectly prepared lesson plans and if the students are not engaged, all that content knowledge and preparation is useless. As a result, I decided to focus my inquiry plan on student engagement.
My plan utilizes Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences to help increase student engagement.
I took several lessons and focused on one or two of the intelligences identified by Gardner. i have started implementing this plan in my classroom.
The first two intelligences I addressed where the logical-mathematical and the musical intelligences. My students were studying how to find the mean of a set of data. I found a song called "Call Me Mean (I'm just Average)" by Harry Guffee. The students had a lot of fun with this song despite its country music type flair. I had copied the lyrics for the students to read as the song played. After the song played through the first time, the students begged me to play it again. Six of my students asked if they could go to the front of the class and sing along. Of course I said yes. I replayed the song, the students at the front of the class sang along and hammed it up. Overall, I think this lesson was very successful. I am positive that more than one student will not forget that the mean is the average!
The next intelligence I addressed was the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. I wrote a series of test scores on the board with the directions to create a line plot of the data. I asked for two volunteers who then held up a large, laminated number line that had numbers 85 to 100 on it. I
randomly handed students half sheets of card stock with large "x's" printed on them. I would hand the student the "x" and tell him or her what score they represented. They would go and stand behind the number line at the appropriate place. Once all the scores were "recorded", I asked the students a series of questions about the graph where the answer would be a student's name. For example, I asked "Out of this set of data, who represents the median?". Judging by the students' reactions, the engagement level was very high. It was much higher than the times when I taught this lesson by having the students create their own line plot from the data on the board.
Next week, I plan on addressing several other of Gardner's intelligences. I will blog about those activities at that time.
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So cool- I love to hear about the music- I would love to hear the song. I am so glad that it was successful. I also like the human number line. It sounds like engagement has been good so far. Eager to hear about the rest.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like an exciting class to be in. Using songs and music to reinforce concepts is an excellent way to help students remember things. I still have to sing the planet song I learned in elementary school to put them in the right order. I am glad your lesson went well. So many students seem to struggle with or dislike math. These activities should certainly make it more fun and hopefully the students will retain the skills.
ReplyDeleteI love the song! I don't think we sing enough in school. It amazes me how many songs there are for education, but we don't take advantage of them. I think it's great the students wanted to sing in the front of the class. It's great your students were open to new ideas in the classroom. Great job!
ReplyDeleteMaking math fun seems crazy right. So many kids do not like math and it is often difficult to figure out why. Is it the formulas, the steps to problem solving, or just plain don't understand. The thought of singing songs to help students retain information in math is great. Please send me any resources you have, I teach a resource Geometry class and collaborate in Geometry and helping students retain information is always a struggle.
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