Andie Deschapelles

TLS 316

Written Analysis

8 December 2017

Written Equity Analysis

The lesson that I taught to my second grade students was a lesson about place

value and introducing sticker books. The key concepts of this math lesson was the

students will be able to use place value to model two-digit numbers as tens and ones and

to write equations that represented a two-digit number as tens and ones. For example, if

the students were given the number 45, they would write the equation 40 + 5 = 45. The

students also were to find the difference between two digit numbers that were between 10

and 100. In this lesson, I referred to the “sticker station,” which is something that the

students had background knowledge of from previous lessons. At the sticker station, the

children know they can buy stickers in strips of tens or individual stickers.

At the very beginning of the lesson, I introduced the students to sticker books. I

told the students that the sticker books pages could either hold individual stickers or strips

of ten stickers. The students came to the conclusion that they could fit 100 individual

stickers or 10 strips of 10 stickers on each sticker book page. We then went in to some

practice problems as a group to figure out how many stickers were shaded on a page and

wrote equations to represent the amount on each page. After this, the students went back

to their desks and did some independent practice. Most of the independent practice was

problems that the students were familiar with from the introduction. However, the last

two problems were word problems with an addend unknown. This was something my
students had never done before so my mentor and I were curios to see how they would

problem solve through these last two problems. Finally, we met back up for a whole

group discussion about the last two word problems.

I felt that different parts of my lesson promoted different levels of participation.

At the beginning of the lesson, the students were very engaged and I had a high level of

participation from most of my students. This participation stayed pretty strong throughout

the entire introduction. The students were still engaged through the first half of their

independent work but I could tell they were starting to lose interest. By the final

discussion, I only had a few students who were still participating. I think this was partly

because it was the very end of the day and the students were ready to go home and partly

because a lot of them did not understand the last two word problems, since they were

pretty challenging.

While watching my video through a student learning lens, I was able to see some

of the strong understandings of concepts that my students know that I did not

immediately notice as I was teaching my lesson. I noticed that my students have an

understanding of some emergent multiplication concepts that they may not even realize is

multiplication yet. I had my students explain how they figured out how many stickers

each sticker book page could hold. One student described that she knows the sticker book

page could hold 100 stickers because she saw “10 rows of 10 stickers and that makes

100.” I had the students talking in pairs for this part of the lesson and many of them had

very similar responses.

I also noticed that my students have a really good understanding of place value.

When they were trying to figure out how many stickers were on a sticker book page they
would first count by tens for the strips of stickers and then count by ones for the

individual stickers. On one of the sticker book pages, I had shaded in 35 stickers and

asked my students if they could figure out how many stickers were shaded and how they

knew. One of my students said “It’s 3 tens and 5 ones so that’s 35.” I also noticed that

students used a variety of techniques to figure out how many stickers were on each page.

On this same page, another student said, “I know there’s 10 stickers in each row and three

rows are filled in completely. Then there’s one more row that’s filled in half way so

that’s 5 more.” A third student used a similar technique but he said that “I saw there’s

almost 4 rows filled in so that would be 40 but then I took away 5 for the empty boxes.” I

really enjoyed re watching my video and listening to the variety of strategies that children

used to reason with these pictures because I saw how many different ways all my

students think. I think it was important that multiple different strategies were shared

because the students can see that there are multiple ways to solve math problems. It also

might have helped a student understand the problem better if they were looking at it from

a different perspective.

I also noticed that there were some students who had some misunderstandings

when they were practicing their problems individually. On one of the practice

worksheets, students were given a number of stickers and they had to shade in a

representation of that number on the sticker book page. For example, if they were given

the number 45, they would have to shade in four rows and five individuals. The students

were supposed to be shading in the stickers horizontally because the sticker station only

sold strips of 10 stickers horizontally. One student was shading in the picture in vertical

strips. I think this student was having such a hard time shading in the strips horizontally
because they are usually shown vertical rods when they are working with place value. I

think he was having a hard time seeing place value in a new perspective.

I saw another misunderstanding when students were writing equations to

represent the pictures they had just shaded in. One boy wrote the equation “10 + 10 + 10

+ 10 + 5 = 45,” instead of writing “40 +5 = 45.” Another student I was working with

wanted to write the equation “20 + 15 = 35” instead of writing “30 + 5 = 35.” I think a lot

of the time my students are used to trying to find multiple ways to solve a problem so

they were trying to find multiple different ways to write the same equations. To help

these students, I tried to explain that we want to separate the tens place and the ones place

when we are writing our equations so we can see the separation between stickers bought

in strips of ten and stickers bought individually.

I also watched my video through a teaching lens and focused on the moves that I

made as a teacher. I noticed that one of the ways I responded to students thinking was

asking them “How do you know that?” or “Can you show us your thinking?” The first

time I shaded in a sticker book page on the board, I asked students to talk in pairs and to

figure out how many stickers were shaded in. At first the students would just say “35”

and would not explain how they knew. I was able to respond in a way so that I was able

to hear how my students were thinking when they were solving the problem.

I would also use this same strategy when students responded with an incorrect

answer. The students had just finished explaining how they knew there were 35 stickers

shaded on the page and it was time to write an equation that went with the picture we just

made. I was hoping that the students would automatically write an equation that separated

the tens and the ones. However, the first boy who answered said “20 + 15.” Instead of
saying that he was incorrect, I asked him to come up and show how his equation went

with the picture. As soon as he came up and started explaining he said, “Oh, wait never

mind.” I asked him if he wanted to change his equation and he said, “it should be 30 + 5.”

When watching my video back, I realized I also made a mistake as the teacher. I should

have asked this student to complete the equation because without an equal sign, it is not

an equation. I also made the mistake of writing the equations on the board as “30 + 5”

and not completing the equation myself.

To follow up on this lesson, I think I would create a mini lesson with addend

unknown problems and give myself more time to teach this portion. During my lesson, I

asked my students to attempt these two word problems and then we did them both

together as a class for the end discussion. About half of my students attempted these

problems and used their prior knowledge about place value and addition to figure these

problems out and the other half was very confused about these two problems. Since my

discussion was at the very end of the day, I only had about 10 minutes to work through

these problems with my students. I think that I did not give myself enough time to fully

explain these problems and the lesson ended on a note with some students having

misunderstandings about the final problems. If this was my classroom, I think I would

have spent some time the next day looking at word problems with an addend unknown

and sharing the different kinds of strategies that could be used to solve these problems.

Then, I would go back to the problems from the day before and have my students use the

strategies we just talked about to work through those problems.