Matt Perry Last post

After reading the Marzano chapter on building a hypothesis I realized that I have my students do that everyday. It may not be an intricate thing where the students know they are building a hypothesis but I teach them critical thinking skills that help them disect questions and do better on their exams. Right now Ohio is in full fledged achievement test mode so all the teacher has been doing is drilling for the achievement tests. This has led to a lot of down time for me because all I do is sit there and snooze. When I get to teach second period I start to break down the questions for them so they can learn how to eliminate certain choices. The best example I have of this is a recent question about native americans. They were asked which people built their homes out of dirt the choices were the Pueblo, Sioux, Inuit and Adena. At first this seems like a pretty hard question and many of the students were at a loss but I helped them through it to show how they can disect questions on the achievement test. I frist asked them to tell me something about the Sioux and one student says that they lived in the great plains and moved around a lot so them I said then would they have been the people to make permenent houses out of dirt? This cancelled out the Sioux, then another student pointed out that the Inuit people are from the artic regions and they isn't any dirt to build from so there is two answers squashed right away. Then a student finally remembered the the Pueblo people lived in the southwest and build houses out of the ground so they had it!