As a teacher your constant hope is to inspire your students… a constant hope that motivated students will be challenged and unmotivated students will be experience success.

I have a treasure box in my classroom. I teach high school geometry. They love the treasure box–we are never too old for simple fun like dollar tree treats!

Today was the second day of our new unit–Unit 7: Circles. The day’s lesson started with 5 review practice problems. One student who does not typically have great participation immediately asked me for help. He said “Hey, can you come here? I want to know something…” That’s how he asked for help. Isn’t it just amazing to hear a student say “I want to know something”? I immediately made my way over to his desk. He asked me a question and with some minimal scaffolding he was successful on the problem.

There is a different student in this class that often says phrases like “I have the biggest brain in this class” and similar anecdotes expressing his belief that he is the best. This student is indeed very bright and mathematically proficient. That student said out loud “I don’t remember how to do this” and so I asked the student who had just asked for my help to go and teach that problem to that student.

It was amazing what happened the rest of the class… after one of the most struggling learners helped one of the most successful learners in the room, the typical struggling student helped another student, unsolicited. Once that student sat down I told him to get something out of the treasure box.

“Dude… bet!” is what he said. Or something similar. Something involving teenage slang (wow, I sound old).

He chose a little lego-like person. We came to call it a dollar tree lego.

Later in today’s lesson we were looking at examples and non-examples of arcs to help us develop a definition of the term. All day long I had been waiting to hear something like what he came up with: “A partial perimeter of the circle.” One of his tablemates coached him to change “perimeter” to “circumference.” I let him know that I had been waiting for that type of definition all day.

There were several more opportunities for other students to win something from the treasure box in that class and two of the students chose to get more dollar tree legos of different characters and gift them to that student.

For a student who has also faced discipline issues throughout the year, I was proud of him on multiple levels. I was so proud that I stopped by an assistant principal’s office and shared his great work.

I will take this win and hope for more tomorrow. What are some of your recent classroom wins?