6. Submit a Log

Looking at the concept comparison organizer and routine, we were thinking of so many topics that we could use with this.  A lot of the social studies and science topics have many details that can be confusing, such as the simple machines, or ancient civilizations.  This would surely be a tool to help break it down and summarize the similarities and differences with them.  We really like your suggestion to have this organizer partly filled out.  This would be very helpful for the students who write slower, and would allow us to use the purpose of this and not get hung up on the writing aspect.  For our next one, I can see us giving the partly filled out organizer, and for some of the students giving them a neat copy would also be beneficial.  One thing that was tricky for us, was that the boxes were pretty small and third graders don’t always write small.  I can also see us blowing the boxes up a little bit to give them more space, especially for the summary.  We look forward to doing these in the future.

I created a Comparison Table to examine the overall concept of progress monitoring.  The individual concepts compared are progress monitoring in general education and progress monitoring in special education.  

The co-construction of this concept comparison routine went fairly smoothly.  The lesson script in the guidebook was extremely helpful.  My colleague was able to visualize how she would be able to use this routine in her work.  The most difficult step of the routine was assembling like categories.  This step needed more discussion and explanation to help formulate the categories to which the characteristics belong.  

Question about the like and unlike characteristics/categories.  Based on your feedback do they have to have 1 to 1 correspondence?

I really felt these lessons with the Concept Comparison Routines went well.  The students really enjoyed using these and we kept them in our folders as reference if our students needed them for classwork, quizzes, or tests.  I felt that these routines helped to pull concepts together in my Math 7 class.  

1) What went well?  Overall I think the lessons went well. For our small class with more struggling readers, being able to break down the concepts into likes and differences seemed to help them with comprehension and remembering items that used to be confusing. In our larger cotaught class, the students were able to work through and determine the characteristics more quickly, but still found the graphic organizer helpful.

2) What was a challenge? The biggest challenge in the classes I taught was determining the categories to put the characteristics in. Depending on the subject matter, this was more or less difficult.

3) What will you do next time? Working through the draft with my co-teacher has been helpful in fine-tuning the information. I will continue to collaborate with her as we prepare the lesson using the concept-comparison routine.

I'll use it for the P2G requirements with teachers if they decide they want it. The strategy is potentially helpful to teachers, but I'm so bogged down in the Kelp Forest of Badge Land to see a value.