Jumping into several new topics starting Friday … after a couple of weeks of very necessary being the student of teaching rather than the student-teacher practicing! teaching a full topic at the beginning of semester, with time to really consider the approach and content as a whole, was a very strong experience … by lesson 3 I had gone a bit too fast, then got to give the students something to practice the core stuff, starting easy, and to work on while I helped fill in some gaps individually … I’ll see shortly how much they learnt!!
Overall the first weeks of maths … the biggest rules so far: always always be very specific with requests, always always write down everything, lay it out logically …. and find the right balance between: larger problems/challenges that can be solved with the right kind of hints, scaffolds, collaboration to motivate what follows … moving forward conceptually at an engaging pace … and flipping back to previous material for practice, confidence and building fluency. If there is plenty in the plan, it is easy to drop stuff or take extra time … everything will come in handy some time, if not today!