Demonstration Lessons

Demonstration Lessons

During a demonstration lesson Carollee goes with a teacher into their classroom with their students and demonstrates different math lessons. The teacher (and often other teachers observing) will see how Carollee speaks to the students, how she draws them into the conversation, and how she helps them use what they already know to solve problems that they have never been taught an algorithm for.

Demonstration Lessons are extremely powerful for both the classroom teacher and observers (whether they are administrators or other teachers). It is a very empowering experience for teachers to be coached one-on-one in their own classroom.

Demonstration Lessons are powerful tools to help teachers grow the effectiveness of their mathematics teaching. For this, Carollee goes into a teacher’s classroom and works with his or her own students for a given lesson or series of lessons, the topic of which can be negotiated with the teacher. The teacher, along with any other educators invited, observe the lesson, particularly noting how Carollee speaks to the students, how she draws them into the conversation, and how she helps them use what they already know to solve problems that they have not encountered before.

This is followed by a time of debriefing where the lesson is discussed and questions about it are asked and answered. Demonstration lessons are important because “doing mathematics” is really about thinking and reasoning, not about plunking numbers into algorithms. Students usually have little understanding about why algorithms work, but it is through the deep thinking about concepts, the talking about the “why”, and the figuring things out that mathematical
understanding develops.

Many teachers, in their own personal learning of mathematics, have not had the opportunity to lean in this way. For generations the “here’s how to do it, now practice 50” method of teaching has been prevalent. Demonstration lessons allow teachers to see another approach to teaching mathematics and see it working with their own students.

Problem solving lessons are very good for teachers to watch. Carollee usually bring to the students a question that either has multiple answers or has multiple ways of finding a single answer. Both cases allow for deep thinking and exploration of mathematical concepts and ideas as well as provide points of discussion for the students.

Examples of Questions

Carollee has used the following question with grade 2 students. Even thought it sounds like a multiplication question with only one correct answer, grade 2 students who have not learned multiplication can figure out the answer to this question using many different strategies:

Older students might get a question such at this and be asked to solve it using a variety of strategies:

At one fast food restaurant, a bacon double cheeseburger, king-sized fries, and a medium milkshake provide a Grade 8 student with 390% of the recommended daily grams of fat allowance for a person that age. How many grams of fat are in the meal if the recommended daily allowance is 20 grams?

What is important here is not just getting a correct answer, but being able to justify an answer with mathematical reasoning, and even to be able to show multiple ways of finding that answer. When students can do that they show understanding of the concept(s) involved.