Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Monday, August 10, 2009

The Numbers Method: Another Equity Pedagogical Practice that Should Be Modeled by the Mentor and Implemented by the Mentee

To give each student a chance to participate in classroom discussion, and mitigate against the teacher selecting his or her favorite students to respond, The Numbers Method should be modeled by the mentor and utilized by the mentee. Here is how this equity pedagogical practice can be implemented.

The teacher poses a question to the class. After some wait time has elapsed, e.g. 10 seconds, students raise their hands indicating that they want to share something. The teacher then randomly assigns each member a number identifying the order for sharing information. Accordingly, the teacher might say, ‘You’re number one; you’re number two; you’re number three’, and so on. It is important for the mentor to model selecting students in a random fashion so that students perceive that all members of the class have a fair chance to contribute their ideas.

On the next post we will discuss another equity pedagogical practice, Think-Pair-Community Share.