In Between the Cracks

So I'm posting about one of the questioning strategies that I used the other day in class. I tried the "Muddiest Part of the Lecture." I didn't exactly do it the way it's listed, because I kind of forgot that I was using a particular strategy, but I think the idea is still basically the same. I gave the kids two options for a "Do-Now" prompt that was on the board when they came in. I had gone over conjunctions (coordinating and subordinating) and clauses (independent and dependent) the day before. Admittedly, I did not teach well the previous lesson. I kind of threw a lot of information at them and then gave them examples, hoping that they would just "pick it up," not really considering how methodical I needed to be in my instruction. So for their "Do-Now" instructions, I told the kids they could either write down a question about yesterday's lesson that they were unclear about; or, if they thought they were clear about everything, then they could prove it by writing a complete sentence with a dependent clause first, collowed by an independent clause. I told them to make sure they use the correct punctuation. After explaining what I wanted to almost every individual, I collected their responses. A majority of the kids wrote something to the effect of "I understand everything we went over, but I can't think of how to write it in a sentence" or "I know how to do it, I just forgot how to use it in a sentence." I actually had to chuckle and give the kids credit for finidng a way to do neither of what I asked them. I basically offered them choice A ro B and several of them chose choice C. Now what is much more discouraging is that perhaps 6 of the 20 or so kids actually did what I asked them (wrote a question or correctly composed the sentence). The rest of the class did what I just told you about (Choice C), or tried to compose the sentence, believing they were doing it correctly, and completely screwed it up. Most of what I got were simply independent clauses with incorrect punctuation. The good thing, which I think is the entire purpose of this strategy, was that I got to see what we needed to spend more work on. I am somewhat torn between feeling disappointed and unsurprised. I know several of the second years will tell me that I should get used to this, and that things will probably get much worse, but I also don't want to lower my expectatiosn to the point where I'm not longer expecting the kids to learn. I think this was a good technique for pointing out by shortcomings as a teacher, but I still believe that the kids should have at least been able to identify an independent clause. Well, I guess I'll find out how much they really learned when the test comes around.