Blah Blah Blah

Last night I went to the North Sound Student Reading Council's presntation on GLAD (Guided Language Acquistion Design). GLAD is a framework that was created to help make content comprehensible to all students - especially those students learning English as a second language.
It was such a great presentation and I went home taking my new knowledge and reflecting upon the Math Lesson I taught on Tuesday. I taught a lesson out of Investigations about Number Strings - adding multiple numbers together such as: 8+6+4+2. I prepared for the lesson understoon the lesson - but while I was teaching I was looking out at all of those faces and thinking "Oh no, they don't get it." The lesson was all about taking a number string and breaking it into smaller parts - using the facts they know to complete a longer problem. So, 8+6+4+2 students recognized that 6+4 is 10 - yet the process from there (basically the purpose of my lesson) started breaking down from there.
As a class we completed a few number strings together, I asked students to tell me how they would begin then what we should do next... ect. When they went back to their desks though there were blank papers. I stopped the class and modeled a problem again, asking for student suggestions and guidance. I worked with students in small groups.
I realized that to me, adding a number string is easy. I start with the combination I know 4+6 = 10- then I know to add the remaining numbers left in the string, to that sum of 10. As much as I tried to explain and model this to students I just felt like my content was getting more and more un-comprehensible. I may have well just been saying, "blah... blahblah...blahblah" Yet it wasn't only what I was saying --- it was how I was writing the problem.
In the lesson I taught, the curriculum didn't model for me how I should show students to organize their equations. I automatically did the first equation 4+6 = 10 brought the 10 down to the next line 10+ (a remaining number) = x, then x + (the last number) = your total.
Oh my goodness, of course students were having trouble - (and to my defense of course I had trouble teaching it) these are multiple step problems that students can do in their heads but when they are asked to show their thinking and write down these steps... I almost feel like the math gets lost in the recording. Students were having trouble making the connections between how they solved the problem in their head and how they can write those steps on paper. I know they were having trouble because I wasn't being the most effective in showing them.... but I tried different ways and I know it was difficult for me to find the perfect way because it is so implicit for me now. I've had math for years and I know how to show my work, I know how to organize addition problems in multiple steps.
It was just a rough lesson on Tuesday because I wasn't sure what else to try, what else to say, or how I could find those words to explain to them the writing that was on the whiteboard. To explain the equations I used to solve the multiple addend problem.
I know I am learning and this was a good lesson for me - I realized that especially when you take a lesson out of a curriculum you really have to think through the various parts that the lesson just assumes will be understandable to students. I hadn't thought of how to most clearly show students how to show their work- and they had many different steps they took to solve the problem. This would have been a really important aspect to talk with Marcia about before I taught the lesson --- now I'll be on the lookout for those aspects for sure!