Video 2- 4th grade division

This lesson is taught in a fourth grade classroom and is directed for students who were struggling with story problems requiring division. Students tended to be challenged by interpreting the math language in the word problems. The step of drawing a “math picture” or model of the problem, poses a challenge for many students who have limited exposure to models. I think presenting a model to students to help guide them in solving the word problems was a good idea. It is an engaging challenge for students of all levels to attempt to make sense of someone else’s model or strategy. There were several teachers and administers that offered help and opinions to Mrs. Sherman. It is sometimes hard to know what to do or what to change when students are having trouble understanding a concept, so Mrs. Sherman did the right thing having a small intervention! The main purpose of the lesson was to introduce the “Singapore Bar Model” to students who had never seen it before to try and help improve students problem solving. They used the previous math knowledge of solving “division” story problems to introduce the model. They taught a similar lesson in a neighboring classroom with the same content, but a “direct teaching” instructional style. The intent was to compare student responses from the two lessons. They instructed the multiplication/division similarly in both lessons. I thought this was a really interesting concept and think it is a great idea. All children learn in different ways, so looking at which teaching strategy was more effective was a great idea. The goal in this process was formative assessment of students’ understanding of these concepts and opportunity to engage in the main idea of equal parts. For this lesson only, we designed the exploration of one or more story problems, but they were only able to get to one of the problems due to time. I believe that this tends to happen often, so teachers should really be aware of time constraints.