Application to Your Classroom, Part 1

With your PLC, discuss how you will apply the ideas from this module in your classrooms.

Select a Finding Numbers or Adding Up clothesline routine to try in your classroom. As a PLC, decide if everyone will select the same number and endpoints (e.g. Find 76 with 0 and 100 marked) in their classrooms or if you will adapt the routine for different classrooms. We recommend everyone in the PLC select the same routine with the same conditions to facilitate conversation.
Discuss how you will plan to support students in using the lengths on the clothesline to justify their placement. What questions will you ask? What prompts will you give?
Decide on the specific classroom artifact (e.g. picture of completed clothesline, video, or student whiteboard recordings) you would like each person to collect and bring back to the PLC after trying this in their classroom.

Application to Your Classroom, Part 2

After all members of the PLC have had a chance to try an Finding Numbers or Adding Up routine in their classrooms, discuss the results. Each member of the PLC should bring one or more artifacts from their classroom such as student work from the activity, pictures of the completed clothesline, or video from your teaching to support this discussion.

Classroom Outcomes Discussion

To guide your discussion of the data, we have provided a discussion structure adapted from the protocol, "Save the Last Word for ME." This protocol is designed to support a focused discussion about classroom data.

Choose a timekeeper (who also participates). Read the through the protocol steps and decide as a PLC the length of time you would like to spend on steps 4-7.
Each participant identifies a significant idea or aspect of the classroom artifact(s) that they brought to the PLC meeting (e.g. student work, a picture of what was written on the board during the whole class discussion, or a snippet of video).
When all members of the group are ready, one person volunteers to be the presenter. The presenter briefly describes the class where the artifact was collected and then presents the classroom artifact. At this time, the presenter should avoid giving too much information and specifically not state what he/she noticed in the artifact, what he/she found interesting, or why this artifact was chosen. Please let the artifact speak for itself and avoid describing student work as being high, medium, or low.
All members of the group pause for a moment to silently consider the artifact before moving to the next step.
Other members of the PLC (not the presenter) discuss what they notice and wonder about the artifact. The presenter is silent and taking notes during this time. Typically, 3-5 minutes for this step is a good length of time.
The presenter then has time (3-5 minutes) to explain why he/she chose the artifact and to respond to and build on what he/she heard from the others during Step 5.
Repeat steps 3-6 until all members of the PLC have had a chance to be the presenter and to have “the last word.”
End with an open dialogue about the artifacts. What questions and ideas were raised that you want to follow up on? What next steps will you take?