Rationale
Grissom Elementary is a high-performing school with diverse ethnicities represented. It has students in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. Approximately half of the student body is made up of Hispanic and African-American students. The other half is a combination of Caucasian, Asian, and Native Americans. Many students attend Grissom based upon school choice, where parents apply to attend this site within the larger Tulsa Public Schools system. The school was founded in 1969 and is named after astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom. His name implies exploration and service which is a major focus of student life. The school is a demonstration school for the Oklahoma A+ Initiative, which integrates the arts into all areas of the curriculum.
My students have been identified as gifted based upon their classroom performance and/or criteria established by the district to signify advanced potential. My fourth grade students have been with me as their gifted teacher for the past four to five years. My students come from diverse ethnic backgrounds and have academic abilities that are advanced when compared to other students in their age/grade levels. Sometimes they seem trapped by their giftedness, and they feel that they have to know the right answers at the beginning of a study. They can be afraid of being wrong and of letting their peers see that they do not always know the correct answer. They are not comfortable challenging their own thinking on a topic. Most are used to being “smart,” which in their minds translates to: if I don’t know the answer then it is not worth studying. They can sometimes have the fixed mindset that I’m smart and I want to make sure that I get the right answer. If they are questioned about their thinking, many times, they cannot explain how they arrived at their conclusion. They say, “I don’t know how I know, I just know.” I will use this response as a pretext for a class discussion about how to solve a problem.
I want to use a visual concept of the skill, starting with a hands-on demonstration, then match that to a pictorial representation, and only later proceed to the algorithm. I hope this will assist them in breaking out of that fixed mindset and move towards a more growth mindset approach that says, “The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more that your brain cells grow.”(3)
I want my students to use their reasoning and thinking abilities to work through problems and discuss with others how they are solving the problems, and work in small groups of peers. Not only is the review of these skills necessary to go deeper, it will allow me as the instructor to use relevant problems that will allow my students to apply problem-solving skills. I also want them to feel comfortable not knowing the answer immediately and be willing to talk about their misunderstandings in small group discussions. I want the students to … “learn to reason and to justify their solutions to learn that mathematics is about making sense.”(4)
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