High Order Questions

The past couple weeks the elementary school I aide at have been doing state testing. Teachers and aides are not allowed to "help" the students on the tests, however we can read the questions to them and ask them questions to get their minds on the right track. It is important to be careful in what you say though because you are not technically supposed to be helping, just guiding them in the right direction or reminding them that they know how to do it and they must be nervous. High order questions are important to ask students when they are struggling but they really know the answers or how to do the problems. If a student is struggling you could ask them what do you need to do next (not telling them what to do but reminding them to think about it in a different way maybe). Reminding students of practice tests to think back to help them in the current test is also very useful. High order questions are important because they allow guide the student in the right direction while allowing them to do it all by themselves. The teacher and student teacher in my third grade class are very careful about the questions they use and that is important so as not to directly help the child when they are supposed to the work themselves. Overall, asking high order questions can be very key to students success.

Lesson Clarity

There are many different ways to clarify a lesson in the classroom. I have observed a few of these lesson clarifications in my third grade class. I am in the class mostly for math and a little bit of reading time. During math, the kids do math stations in groups of about four around the room. Every time the teacher introduces a new station, the class first goes through it as a class so they get the hang of it and can ask any questions they may have. I think this is a great way to make sure the lesson of that math station is clear for the students. They have a chance to play it and understand it as a group so that when it comes time to do in stations they already know how to play it and won't have to learn a new game at each station. When I first came into this class I did not know about this process so I did not completely understand what was going on, however the students knew exactly what to do without needing the teacher to tell them.
Also, when the class is transitioning and some kids are not doing what they have been told, instead of the teacher just telling a single student several students, he will just say something like, "Oh I really like how Suzy got up, pushed her chair in and walked quietly." This way of reminding the students what they are supposed to be doing and praising a student rather than just reprimanding a student seems very affective.
Another way the teacher clarified a lesson for the students was when the kids were trying to match a 2D image of blocks with the real blocks in front of them. This was very difficult for several students to get the hang of but walking around the classroom and talking about it helps them a lot. Also the teacher put the blocks up on screen to show the whole class what it actually looks like so they could really see it in case they had not gotten the answer themselves.
The teacher I observe does a great job of explaining things verbally and visually for his class and the class usually seems to know what is going on very well.