I engage student interest with every lesson.

The engagement an re-engagement of students will happen in the lesson I will be administering in week 7 of this course by using the explicit teaching format that has been proven to work for teaching mathematics by Hinton et al (2014). That explicit teaching format is the ‘I do, We do, You do’ format. Hubbell & Goodwin (2013) say that the re-engagement at 10-minute intervals can take the format of moving from direct instruction to guided examples to independent practice to review. This is quite close to being the exact format of the explicit teaching employed in my math lessons. So, during the ‘I do’ phase I will write two to three long division problems and multiplication problems on the board and use meta-cognition as I work them out. The students during this time, instead of just staring at the board and listening to me, use their own personal whiteboards to follow along. I believe this keeps the students engaged during that 10 to 15-minute ‘I do’ meta-cognition phase.

The second phase of the lesson is the ‘We do’ phase. This takes the form of yet another series of long division and multiplication problems written on the board that will be solved with student input. The student input takes the form of me calling on students to help complete the steps of the math problems. The switch between the student simply watching a problem being solved with meta-cognition to them being active participants in helping solve the problems on the board will re-engage the students in the lesson.

The last phase of my 45-minute math lessons is independent practice. This independent practice is usually done in the form of worksheets. Worksheets might not be the most exciting thing that have ever existed within the classroom, but they are the backbone of teaching elementary mathematics. Practice is paramount for students to be able to remember the steps of multiplication, the times tables, long division, or any of the basic building blocks of mathematics. As my classes are only 45 minutes, I believe that there is only three shifts that are needed to re-engage students and this is done through the ‘I do, We do, You do’ teaching model of explicit instruction.

References
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Hinton, V., Stroizer, S., & Flores, M. (2015). A Case Study in Using Explicit Instruction to Teach Young Children Counting Skills. Investigations in Mathematics Learning, 8(2), 37–54. doi: 10.1080/24727466.2015.11790350
 
Hubbell, E. R., & Goodwin, B. (2013). The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching: A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day. ASCD.