Ah-ha Moments

As a teacher, you should adjust your teaching strategies to suit the needs of your students.  Over the years as an AVID teacher, I've noticed that some of the reflection questions asked on the Tutorial Request Form (commonly referred to as TRFs... pronounced:  turfs).  One that's the topic of today's blog is where students need to respond to the question:

"What I found most meaningful about today's tutorial session is...".

Students have gotten confused over the 5 questions and would give some variation of the same answer for all of the questions, so I've altered the reflection where the differences are in bold.  So the question now looks like this: 

"What I found most meaningful about today's tutorial session is...".  

This question continued to confuse students, so when I was reteaching, I was explaining that the answer would be what students said to themselves, "Ohhhhh".  As a reminder for when the students answer on their own, I again tweaked the question to:

"What I found most meaningful (your "ah-ha" moment) about today's tutorial session is...".

Since the students work in collaborative groups with a college tutor, the tutors grade the TRFs.  Today I found myself grading some that were turned in late to discover that a student responded:
What I found most meaningful (your "ah-ha" moment) about today's tutorial session is...when [the student presenter] started making weird and funny noises and that made me laugh.

I did not find this so humorous and wrote a note asking what this had to do with the topic of the tutorial session (which happened to be square roots).

So fast forward a few class periods and I had an 8th grader ask me for help regarding this same question and after explaining, he shared that he thought I wanted to know what he found so funny about the tutorial.  

This blew my mind and instantly became my "ah-ha" moment!  When other students overheard, it was really amazing how many students were confused, yet didn't ever ask for clarification.  Several students chimed in saying they too thought I was asking for what they found to be funny.  Thank goodness someone clarifies that I didn't ask for a "ha ha" moment, but an "ah-ha" moment.

So just today I've realized that it doesn't matter how old you are or how many years you've been teaching, we all have "ah-ha" moments!