Feedback

I had the best time this week.  Well, let's be honest.  Monday and Tuesday were rough, but man, by Wednesday, I felt on a roll, making the magic happen. And then there's Friday where I overslept by two hours, but man I felt well rested!

We're at that point in the year where students can start demonstrating they are learning which gets me thinking: how am I going to give feedback to all 150 of my students? I mean, seriously!  I know feedback not attached to grades is powerful.  I know feedback is one of the best ways to improve student learning (duh!).  But what type of feedback is sustainable?   Sustainable implies I don't spend 12+hours at school each day to give them meaningful feedback.

Itechnology 

I understand that too often technology gets in the way of learning.  Sometimes teachers spend so much time trying to figure out how to use some piece of technology that they forget what the students should be learning.  My love of technology isn't regularly clouded with such cloudiness.  Technology represents an outstanding way to give feedback swiftly and more regularly.  Here are three different ways I used technology in my three courses to provide feedback to students. And, trust me, I didn't spend inordinate amounts of time prepping these things, but I am very up to speed on tools available to me and I am relentless when figuring them out.

9th Grade Intermediate Algebra

Seriously, look how adorable they are talking to each other about math!
Aren't they the best!

The two units we start the year with are review of concepts they have seen in 8th grade algebra.  I've been grappling with how to get them engaged and recognizing their common mistakes and misconceptions yet also learning to work together in pairs and teams.  Today we were working on simplifying expressions where students need to distribute a -1 to all the terms inside of the parentheses.  To get them talking about the math and working together, one student had a marker and one pulled up a "Unicorn Race" on Socrative.  The game had 10 questions with multiple choice answers (not ideal), but the goal was to accurately solve your problem and your unicorn would move across the screen.  If you were incorrect your unicorn would stay put.  It was the perfect mixture of competition and collaboration to get them talking about how to simplify the expressions.    What I found the most powerful was the learning that happened between the day of the Unicorn Race and when I asked the same question the next day, this time without the answer choices.

Here's the original question. When I posed the question on day two, I didn't reveal the answer choices.

The graph below shows the results on day one when they worked with a partner.

As you can see, over half of the students selected the same wrong answer on day one.  But the next day, in a quick show of hands and after visually scanning student's papers, ALL of my students got it right.  I mean c'mon!  How awesome is that!  We celebrated and moved on to good old pencil and paper for our next concept of solving equations with distributive property. 

If you aren't familiar with Socrative.com, it is worth your while.  It has four options for creating your own assessments, you can share them with colleagues and get spreadsheets and item analyses of the results.  The interface is very user friendly and it is quick to get your students to the site and enrolled in your class for an assessment.  Next on the list to explore feedback in this class: PLICKERS!  

Algebra 2 and the Google Add-On AutoCrat

As I investigate ways to give students feedback on their homework without grading each homework, this week I gave a Homework Check on google forms.  This worked well because the questions were around evaluating functions and describing a domain.  I asked three simple questions from their homework a few nights prior.  I can't say they did very well on the problems, but the goal was to give them feedback on their learning meaning the assessment was formative.

There are some strong misconceptions formed when our high school went to gradebooks that were required to have 80% of grade be Summative Assessments (commonly thought of as tests and quizzes) and 20% of the grade be Formative Assessments (commonly thought of as homework, classwork).  Many people assumed that meant the Formative was less important since it represents less in the gradebook.  I cannot stress enough that formative only equals 20% because we are bound to make mistakes when we are learning something.  Formative assessments aren't worth less, they represent less in our gradebooks because we don't want to penalize students for not knowing something early on in the learning.  Instead their grade will represent what they know and can do once a summative assessment appears.  If I had it my way, the grade would be 100% Summative and we would find a way to get students to do the daily work (formative work) necessary to be successful on the summative rather than enticing them with points in a gradebook.  

OK. Rant over.

Back to the homework check.  I asked three questions and the spreadsheet looked like this after students submitted their solutions:

Conditional formatting is one of my favorite quick tools.  I set it up to automatically highlight many of the correct answers so I could do a quick scan and see how students were doing with the concepts. This gives me, as the teacher a pulse on the class.  I now know in general how well the students understand the concepts.  

But, formative assessment shouldn't stop at the teachers.  Using the google add-on Autocrat, I sent the results back to the students in a google document.  The document populates itself with the students' responses and had the correct answers already written up.  Each student received an email and they were instructed to reflect on how they did.  Here is a sample of the student work:

Bam!  Student Self Reflection sheet created with the click of a few buttons!

The documents also organize themselves into a folder in my google drive account so I can follow up and leave additional comments for students if necessary.  

I can't stress enough how easy this all was.  Yes, I am good at technology and I persisted even when the documents didn't send out the first time, but after getting over those initial bumps, the benefits far outweigh the little bits of extra work and headaches encountered.

Probability and Statistics and Google Classroom

Google Apps for Education is, perhaps, my favorite little piece of amazingness that has rocked my teaching world.  I'm not talking about the fact that it rocked my world when it began and I've been in love ever since.  I'm saying it rocks my teaching world regularly.  Most recently, I have fallen in love with Google Classroom.  What a phenomenal tool that I cannot begin to imagine what it will become.  I've been using this tool extensively in my Probability and Statistics course.  As a first period class with mostly seniors, we had our first Hybrid day on Thursday.  Students were able to log into their google classroom, see the assignment and begin the work.  On Thursday morning, I peaked at my google drive folder with the assignments and could see who had started the assignment:

Because, you know, google is awesome like that, I can see all the assignments I've assigned in a nice little folder.  Anyone that knows me knows that I am a scatter brain.  In fact, I think my close family wonders how I successfully create lessons each day without forgetting something.  Google Classroom is making my organization so peaceful and painless.  All I have to do is create the learning opportunities and Google Classroom keeps it all in order.  Thank you google.  From the bottom of my heart, for being so darn amazing and making FREE tools for education that simplify our lives and let us focus on the learning and the teaching.

Week 1

First of all, it was a LONG short first week with the kiddos.  We were on a special schedule that put us at only 4 minutes of passing time for our three days with students.  I have prep last hour, and let me tell you, not having a moment to breath from 7:50a.m. to roughly 1:30pm each day was rough.  Not to mention the only time I sat down was for a thirty minute lunch.  Whew!  It was a doozie.  With a pep fest on day one that highlighted academic clubs (outstanding work KHS Student Government!) and chromebooks being distributed to each and every student on day two, the week felt a bit too out of my control.  But it reminds me of the advice from my mentor teacher, Sharon, who encouraged me during my first year of teaching to never for get the f-word... flexibility.  Flexibilty was key this week because I had no power to change the circumstances.  I needed to just go with the flow.  Regardless, here is how I spent my first week with students and how the MathTwitterBlogoshpere shaped this week.

Day 1

First of all, freshman are so adorable (and quiet) on day one.  I mean, seriously!  They were so attentive, curious, and just downright cute.  I need to remember this when they don't appear so cute in the future!  I've got one section of Intermediate Algebra and I'm glad I do.  In the past,  taught a support class at this level for many years and it will be nice to be their primary teacher for a change.

I also teach three sections of Algebra 2, 11th graders.  This is a course entirely new to me.  I've taught the two courses before and the Honors course that comes after, but never Algebra 2.   My PLC had come up with "about you" questions to get students sharing who they are on day one.  This proved to be a great success.  The best two questions were "What did you have for dinner and who did you eat with?" and "What is one thing I should know about you?".  The insights into these students backgrounds from these questions was perfect.  I loved being able to get a glimpse into their lives so early in the year.

In all of my classes, the students completed the "Broken Circles" team builder from the book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogenous Classroom. Dane on his Math Happens Blog describes it very well.  A colleague and I participated in this team builder last May at MCTM's Spring Conference and were excited to try it out with students.  I will admit, I appreciate the moral of the activity, but it was just too easy.  The students were done with the circles so darn fast!  This was true for all my classes and a few of my colleagues as well.  Before I feel comfortable capitalizing on the moral of the activity, I believe I need to have the students complete a more challenging 'broken circles' activity. More pieces, maybe squares instead of circles, but definitely something that takes more than a minute or two.  I still was able to get them to make conclusions like "We needed to pay attention to what other people needed" and I was able to determine who my talkers were because they were the first to pipe up with "I hated not talking!" but I feel there was more that could have been accomplished from the activity.

Ironically, the night before school started, while half asleep, I realized I didn't prepare any "rules" for my classes.  I am quite a planner, but I am also quite easy going, so I couldn't believe I hadn't thought through setting up "norms" for the class! Ironically, while falling asleep it came to me: Be Kind, Be Present, Be Appropriate.  These 3 Principles seemed very fitting for a high school math class.  Student: Can I go to the bathroom? Me: Is now the appropriate time?  Student: fiddling with phone scrolling through twitter while team is working at the boards. Me: Are you being present right now?  I didn't call them rules, just principles and introduced them with examples similar to the examples stated above.  I'm no longer that teacher who decides to rip a phone away from a kid because the rule is no phone.  We have to find a way to teach students appropriate use of all tools so they are truly prepared.  Being present is also a common, day-to-day challenge for many adults.  I promised my students that if we can be present in class and learn what we need, we won't have the obligatory homework.  And being kind is sort of like a Duh!  We don't have to love everyone we meet, but we need to be kind.

What a great 1st day!! #EaglePride Go directly to your advisor in the morning tomorrow for your chrome book! 💙💛💻

— JFKEagles (@JFKEagles) September 1, 2015

DAY 2

This day felt really out of my hands.  Each period was assigned a 10-15 minute Chromebook lesson, a bootcamp for day one going 1 to 1 at the High School.  Chopping into a 55 minute class with a 10-15 minute video/activity made it difficult to get much done in class.  

MTBoS to the rescue!  

While I had what I thought were adequately long lessons planned, I didn't have nearly enough to fill the time.  So I tapped into a resource I have been dying to use from the MTBoS.  I had students play "Which One Doesn't Belong?" If you haven't seen this resource, it is definitely worth your while.  The beauty lies in the simplicity of the question.  The challenge is in creating a situation where all four choices have a chance at being the outcast of the group.  We did the Shape #2 from the website and it was truly eye opening to see students all navigate to the pentagon corner.  

Shape 2 from wodb.ca

 I was flabbergasted by how they were all searching for that right answer.  (I even attempted a photo of my fifth our all standing in a single corner, but darn blurry iPhone made a photo not worth sharing) In turn I asked, "Why might someone go to the corner of the shape in the top right?"  "Or the bottom left?" They had great arguments for going to these corners, but they weren't comfortable being the person to chose that corner.  It was fascinating.  After doing a few from the shapes page, students became more comfortable choosing out of the ordinary corners and creating arguments for doing so.  I look forward to continuing this activity with all my classes throughout the year to not only build their ability to 'construct viable arguments' but to reinforce math concepts we will be learning.  

Day 3

Finally, a bit of normalcy.  In Algebra 2 students were tasked with a very team-worthy task of stacking functions so that when you input a given number into the first function, you then use the output as the input for the next function, repeating the process until all four functions have been used and you end up with a given output.  This created the ideal situation to put the team whiteboards to good use.  VNPS here I come! Each team had images of four function machines created by the CPM (College Preparatory Mathematics) curriculum.  Teams set off to complete the function machines after giving each team member a role and some general expectations for working at the boards.  Very quickly some teams fell into some old habits: working solo on their notebooks, disengaging from their teams, or taking over on the whiteboard and not explaining to their team what they were doing.  Thankfully, my first two sections are a bit smaller and I was able to get to these teams to remind them of the expectations and support them in doing the math.  The fun part was that this struggle wasn't true of every team.  Some teams fell into a groove with all team members finding some way to support and engage in the work and boy was that fun to watch.  I can't wait to do more with the whiteboards, but I know I need to ensure the problems are truly team-worthy and warrant the interaction of all members.  Additionally, the more opportunities I can give them to build their communication skills, the better, so I hope to incorporate some strategies from Powerful Problem Solving in the near future.

Next week

First I need to dig into the Probability and Statistics Course!  I am excited to have freedom in this class, but it comes with a lot of pressure I put on myself to do great things.  So, while I need to and want to dig in, it's important I do so realistically!
Additionally I need to find a way to build some challenge into the Intermediate Algebra course.  Units 1 and 2 are mostly review.  There's this weird balancing act of giving students a low enough entry point, but also not making it seem as though they've already done all of this.  I'm not quite sure what that will look like, but I know I've got to find a way to challenge them without scaring them off!