Today was the BIG day!

One of the camera guys setting up for filming.

Back in December, I was asked to participate in a new project being implemented by our state's Department of Education and two state universities. The goal is to capture teachers implementing the Standards for Mathematical Practice in their instruction.  The idea is to capture how these practices are implemented in order to provide professional learning opportunities to other  teachers across the state.

So, I was asked to allow them to come in and video tape me teaching a math lesson. Ultimately, they wanted to catch on film the the Standards for Mathematical Practice:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively
• Construct viable arguments & critique the reasoning of others
• Model with mathematics
• Use appropriate tools strategically
• Attend to precision
• Look for & make use of structure
• Look for & express regularity in repeated reasoning

Of course, a single lesson will not have ALL of these standards, but they often have several of them built in.
I wish I had pics to share of the lesson, but I was otherwise engaged. My focus was subtraction with regrouping. The lesson we did was pretty typical for our class.

• I brought the kiddos up the meeting area for a Number Talk. My Number Talks are based out of this book, which is fabulous. What I love about these Talks is that once I have delivered the initial problem, I step to the back and the kids do the talking. Sharing their thinking & their thoughts. I get some very valuable information during these Talks.
• The we moved to the tables where the kiddos completed  word problems. In our classroom, kiddos have open access to the manipulatives. It's interesting to watch them choose different tools for the same problem/activity: bears, unifix cubes, counters, and flats, longs, and cubes. 

I'm not gonna lie. I was nervous. I knew the kids would do a great job and the class portion would be fine. . . . . . .I was nervous about the one-on-one interview I had to do . Yikes! I had to do both a pre- & post- interview. Bleh. But I lived. It was definitely a positive experience!