Survivors' First Meeting
Survivors' First Meeting took place on the 23rd of November. Our topic was “How to Deal with Different Academic Levels in the Same Classrrom”.
Sevda Uygun was our presenter and I was the facilitator and we had chosen the Consultancy Protocol to discuss the topic.
Sevda started off by framing her question. She shared what sort of problems she faced in the classroom. She usually had weak students who needed more practice as well as strong ones who grasped the subject quite easily. The question was how could she reach, motivate and folllow all these different level students in the same classrrom without falling behind the curriculum.
The group asked Sevda clarifying questions after she finished. These were short answer questions. The group asked her the levels she was teaching, how many students and how many mixed abilities did she have.
Later we moved on to probing questions part. The group started asking Why and How questions this time. They asked her, if she had tried different techniques and if she had any positive results. Why didn’t some students learn for instance?
We gave Sevda 15 minutes to answer these open ended questions. The group in this step started discussing the problem and Sevda only listened and took notes. The participants discussed what they did or tried in similar situations. They shared their own learning styles. Sema Tekdoğan and Aylin Geron said that they also had problems with Maths at school. Sema’s solution had been to study with students who were good at Maths after the lesson. Aylin said that in 8th grade they were using a new method to motivate the students. The teacher went into the classroom with a box of varied questions. The students were given some assignments from this box, according to their level of English and if they successfully completed it, it they got a ticket in return. When these coupons reached a certain number, the students grades rose. Mazal Dozbahar and Jeremy Hardy suggested the Tiering Method they were using in High School. Each week they were preparing three different level activites for Prep students all on the same topic. The activities ranged from simple and guided ones to more complex ones. Sırma talked about how she worked individually with some students who were weak in English this year in Primary School.
In the final stage, we were all happy to have discussed this issue. Sevda said she would like to meet some time again to talk about it because she said she had got some great ideas from the group and we all agreed to do so.
Here are some ideas Sevda got from our meeting:
1. Use group work to diffferentiate learning in the classroom. For example prep classes in High School are doing different papers but the students do not know this.
2. Breaking prejudices is an important thing because as we grow older they get harder to break. Aylin said, this was a difficulty ishe faced in her maths lesson when she was a student.
3. Sırma said if weak student are not guided they stop trying.
4. Student interest is important and daily life facts can be used in math teaching.
5. Checking weak student at the end of the class and using peer pressure was an another idea.
6. Preparing different levels of papers and give students time to solve them. Use tickets to reward them
7. Students can teach and help each other better too.
8. It was a good session but at the end of the day, I realised that we had focused on weak students more although my intention had been to discuss all levels.
Sırma Demirel
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