My school has an interesting set up for intervention classes this year; twice a week, I get to meet with a group of 18 students. My goal is to use this time to help these students gain a lot of confidence with the math we are learning in class.
We are only 1.5 weeks into the school year, but my plan for the intervention class is:
- At the beginning of a new unit, use the time to review key knowledge and skills from prior grades. (For example, for Unit 1: Rigid Transformations, we reviewed how to plot points on a coordinate plane and built familiarity with degrees and angles.)
- Mid-unit: Give kids extra time to synthesize and practice what they are learning in class.
- End-of-unit: Not sure yet! Probably, ask kids to dive into tougher problems that really require deep critical thinking and/or problem-solving.
In the process of thinking this through, I clarified my thinking around what the purpose of intervention/support classes could be:
I created a slide deck of great intervention resources to share with my math department. I know there is so much more out there, but this might be useful for teachers who are new to low-floor/high-ceiling tasks or are looking to create support classes that have more of an emphasis on conceptual understanding.
Sample slides:
Link to the full deck of resources here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IKJhmNi6bDBBfQk9wexjGumr4OsCpjhdpHMbI5zsg6E/edit?usp=sharing