Standards based classroom are the norm in Georgia schools. This practice includes many innovative initiatives and best practices that increase and enhance student learning. My classroom operates under that umbrella. It requires instruction time to have an opening a body and a closing. The opener in my classroom works to bring the students into the room and focus their attention on the classwork. Class openers address the current lesson at hand or have the students recall a skill from the previous lesson as well as remediate prior low standards.

Then there is a work period. The work period consists of an activity, either teacher-led or student-led depending upon the lesson that is planned. Within that work period there is a press and release time that can occur depending upon the lesson. This helps to maximize instruction by applying instruction then releasing and letting the students absorb then repeating the process in an eight to ten minute interval for each part. This allows students to focus for a short amount of time then process and absorb what was given to better address attention span of the students. Instructional time is maximized to insure students have the ability to practice and explore the skills they have been taught under teacher supervision.

Embedded within the lesson structure is the standards based white board. A best practice that is expected in all classrooms in Georgia is stating the standard, an essential question, an enduring understanding, and homework. Providing factual focus to the lesson and a way for teachers to provide connections to real world implications; white boards are a necessary learning tool. They help to provide focal points help the students know what is expected to be taught and thus learned.

Just when you think you have delivered a wonderful, thought provoking, mentally stimulating lesson, the students disappoints you and has not been able to show the information that was instructed. There was a situation in which students had been instructed in writing proportions and were moving from phase two of writing proportions to phase three of using proportions to solve for a missing value.

Students were given a class opener in which they had to set up proportions. This opener required students to set up the proportions from word problems. However, the students were not ready to set up the proportions and move towards solving the proportions.

Hence, the lesson that had been planned would have been student centered where students were going to be given word problems and allowed to work at their own pace. But, the students were lacking the necessary skills to carry out the lesson appropriately. Therefore, the lesson that had been planned had to be postponed to the following day.

Occasionally, because my class openers are challenging and rigorous it serves the purpose to assess learning from a previous lesson, or a preview of the coming lesson. This particular time the class opener has turned into an opportunity to reteach once again a given skill that is necessary to move instruction forward. Because mathematics builds on skills, it is often very difficult to move students forward with an unstable fundamental mathematics background. This particular instance in the class stopped the pacing of the lesson. I decided to wait until the next day to move forward and used that day of instruction to remediate setting up proportions and solving without word problems and just numbers. The students were instructed to return to the process of writing the words and then the numbers. Then they were instructed to write the know ration and the ratio with the missing component.

This was the only logical move since a move forward would have been surely a waste since students would not have been engaged because of a lack of skill. Therefore, at times lessons get caught up on the class opener because the prerequisite skill necessary to move forward in the lesson is missing and has to immediately be remediated or retaught.

Many times teacher have to do what I call a temperature check in the classroom to determine if the students are ready to move forward or need to be remediated immediately.