This week’s session was really an effective modeling of what
it means to persevere in problem solving! I enjoyed hearing the many comments
that “these problems are hard!” It makes me think that it is almost a rare
occasion for us to work on challenging problems or we have stopped providing
problems that require us to think deeply about the situation or context.
For us as teachers, it is important that we become familiar
with the variety of representations and models that are articulated in the
frameworks. What impressed me this week was how, when one of us needed
clarification, another one of us had a way of organizing the data in the
problem in a way that, not only helped us, but will allow us to use those models
in our classrooms. Recall Helen’s graphic organizer where she labeled part,
part, whole which helped us determine if we were comparing boys to girls or
boys to total students. I think the advantage of these courses is this
opportunity to share various strategies for making sense of the problems for
ourselves and also to discover effective ways in which we can help our
students.
Anne
