I'm so confused!!!

Being new to the empty nester world, it's time to work on my bucket list.  One thing I have always wanted to do is learn how to play the guitar.  My lessons started a few weeks ago.

At the end of the first lesson, I left excited and inspired, playing a few notes.  That quickly changed. During the second lesson, my instructor was zooming through the content or so I thought.  I left confused and overwhelmed.  As I tried to practice at home, I struggled.  The practice pages looked like a foreign language.  What happened?

When I got back together with my teacher, the first thing I did was tell her that we needed to slow down.  I asked lots of questions and the guitar teacher had an "ah-ha moment".  You see, I have absolutely no musical background - zippo.  As she answered my questions she realized I could not differentiate between notes and chords.  Heck, I couldn't even keep the notes straight.

This experience really helped me to resonate with my students on a whole new level.  How many of them are confused?  Would a student raise his or her hand and announce, "Excuse me, Mrs. Martensen, but this is going too fast and we need to slow down."  Meanwhile others may be thinking, "I know this already.  Let's do something else."

As I collaborate with teachers, we very purposely plan with the lens of making the learning accessible for all.  We talk though the lessons with our student population in mind - who needs strategy work with concrete models, who is ready for the task to be extended to a deeper level.

To support our work, I have created "menus" of instructional moves to either scaffold or enrich the lesson.  These menus are tools to guide our planning.  We pick and choose the strategy or strategies that we think will support student learning.  Note I said, "we think".  We all know the importance of a back-up plan.  The other strategies that we did not initially choose from the instructional moves menu can be folded into the lesson where needed.

The rewards of our planning are so powerful.  Students' learning is centered on their zones of proximal development.  They are not only learning, but exhibiting confidence and expressing that they are having fun, too.  Yahoo!

Keep in mind that this planning goes hand-in-hand with continuous formative assessment, but I will save that for another blog post.

Please share your strategies for meeting the varied learner needs in your math classroom.  We all learn from each other.