As a part of my EMU intervention reflection, I was asked to write about critical moment that has occurred in the past week or so related to the EMU program.
This week I heard my little EMUs self-correcting for the first time. I am sure they have done so before, but to hear them make an error, then correct themselves almost immediately leads me to believe that they have processes working inside their minds now that they may not have had occurring before.
The situation was skip counting along a bead string to prove a two-digit number. One less ten was said, and rather than continue with what obviously felt/looked/sounded incorrect for them, they stopped.
Thought.
Then he said the correct amount of tens and continued on.
Boom!
This doesn’t happen by mistake and is a result of honing the particular skip counting skills with experiences deeply rooted in strengthening the number triad and number sense itself. It also is a reflection of the external (often scaffolded by me) made internal. Many times towards the beginning of the program, when an obvious error (obvious to me) was made, I prompted the child with “Does that look right?”, “Can you prove that number to me?”, “You said x, show me x again”. Now that dialogue runs internally as a part of their self-regulation.
Self-correcting represents a shift in mindset of learning from mistakes and growth. The error does not define the student, and he/she can immediately bounce back with another effort. This is HUGE. At the beginning of the intervention program, a common response to an error was a passive appeal. Growth as a learner in this way is critical to learning across the board.
It also reflects an internalisation of general number sense for that student. Using the analogy from explicit reading instruction, what he did to produce the error must have felt incorrect, looked incorrect and mustn’t have made sense. Therefore I can fix it. The students are constantly honing their number sense through the tuning in task or rich task/investigation. All of these experiences are teased out, stretched, proven, conjectured, disproven and finally become the narrative to play over in their imagination at the next challenge.
Needless to say that I am very proud during moments like this because ultimately it’s less of me and more of them. And that’s the goal. I am there to provide the specific instructional intervention, but the longer they are with me, the more they have become agents of their own learning with less and less prompting from me.
Edu-Inquirer 