Working TOGETHER in Math!

Students think that they are going to walk into "Math World" and enter by themselves and work on problems all alone and they will be able to know how to do each problem. My teacher is trying to break that idea of working alone in Math class. How she does breaks that idea is by forming "homework Groups".

HOMEWORK GROUPS
The students arrive to the classroom with just an answer key on the board with no work show for the problem. They check their homework and compare the answers to the answer key. When the bell rings for the class to start, Mrs. Ondrusek will allow the students to talk about their homework within a designated "homework group". This allows the students to ask their peers how to do a problem that they did not understand themselves. After about five minutes, Mrs. Ondrusek will allow a full class discussion about questions that no one in the group was able to answer correctly. After the class discussion, Mrs. Ondrusek will hand out a haft sheet of colored paper in which there are two simple questions the "homework group" has to answer:
1. We feel confident with...
2. We are still confused about...
This piece of paper will be turned in along with the homework. Mrs. Ondrusek and I read each of the groups haft papers and write little notes that will help them understand a little better. This allow us to look at what we need to go over again if the whole class does not understand something.

I think this is a great tool to be used in the classroom. We have not had an form of assessment yet to compare to the other way Mrs. Ondrusek has done in the past. We shall see in a couple weeks if she will continue this process of correcting homework.

My CT's classroom

The above image is a simple diagram of my teacher's classroom set up. Her largest class size is 34 students, but in her classroom she has 36 desk because she knows the finalized students schedules will not happen until the end of the week. She has the extra desks thinking she might get a couple of new students in the classroom. She would really want to put the students into their "homework groups" because then it would be easier for the students to work together not only on homework, but on the problems the book called "do it yourself" (she calls "work with a partner"). When she gets her classes finalized, she will group the student's desk (if she has room). She is also concerned that not all students will be able to see the front of the classroom. She does not want the students back to her, so that will create a challenge with how many students she has in her classes. She also has some restriction in the classroom, a LARGE air-conditioning unit and her teacher workstation with an Elmo and computer for the smart board. she does not want the students behind these objects in a way they will not be able to see what is going on in the front of the classroom.