Scripted!

While observing in a classroom yesterday to learn about math and technology, I was exposed to an interesting little technique for pulling students together at the beginning of a new class, and drawing their attention to the concept to be learned. 

As a review from the previous lesson, and an intro to the focus for the day, the teacher I was watching created a “forced dialogue”; he had scripted a “here’s what happened last time, and now we are going to do this…”  dialogue, complete with student and teacher parts.  As he revealed the script one line at a time, the whole class was engaged, as they read their parts aloud together.

I decided to try it out in my own classroom this morning.

We had just finished working on growing patterns, and were going to attack a problem involving shrinking patterns today.  My first attempt at a script follows:

Jalissa: We've been working on making patterns.

Ms. Teschow: That's right, Jalissa, we have!

Peter: Yes, we've been exploring growing patterns, like skip counting, for example.

Kaiya: And adding 1 more each time.

Ms. Teschow: What were some ways that we showed our growing patterns?

Josh: Well, we drew dot pictures.

Ms. Teschow: That's right, Josh, we drew pictures of our patterns.

Ahmad: And we wrote down the next few numbers in a number pattern.

Ms. Teschow: And what did you notice happening in a growing pattern?

Selver: It increases each time!

Abdul: You add!

Ms. Teschow: Yes, in a growing pattern, you can use addition to increase the number each time, that is true.

Katie and Lin Hau: We used number lines!

Ms. Teschow: Yes!  Number lines are a great tool to help us with number patterns!

Jimmy: What are we going to do next, Ms. Teschow?

Ms. Teschow: I'm so glad you asked, Jimmy!  Today, we are going to look at shrinking patterns!

Class: (shouts) HURRAH!

While singing the praises of my self-interpreted success afterwards, my colleague reminded me to consider whether the students – as they were reading said script – had been thinking about my intended lesson outcomes, or whether they were thinking, “hey, this is a neat activity”. (He’s been reading a book about how students learn what they think about, and we've been engaging in conversation about the dilemma of how so many of our students seem so unfocussed when we are doing anything at all teacher-directed with the whole class.)

I’m not sure how to assess that yet, so I can’t say one way or another, definitively.  What I can say is this:  Both the students and their teacher were engaged and having fun together this morning!