First Day of School 2015-16

I'm going to try to be a lot better at sharing what goes on in my classroom a lot more. I'll start with my first day of school!

Algebra 2 Honors

I began the class with the birthday seating challenge, as I have for the past four years. My first-period class is smaller, only sixteen students, and they completed the challenge in only a few minutes. The only class that ever did it faster had nine students in it.

My afternoon section of this class is a little larger, and had some more difficulty. They also have a more diverse mix of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. The seat five person raised her hand to report that the class was ready to begin, even after people had openly admitted that they were still wrong. I told them it was not acceptable, and that they had to do it correctly. One girl went up to the board, wrote numbers 1-12 for the months, and then counted people into their seats. They did succeed at the second attempt, and completed the challenge 12 minutes after the bell had rung. Sometimes it's taken over half the class period to finish, so this was still very respectable. I also learned a lot more about this class than I did about first period since they struggled a little more (a great point to make about the importance of productive struggle and persevering.)

I then asked students on Socrative how the activity made them feel, and what they thought the purpose of it was. They got the point really well, and I got to make the point in the afternoon class about how frustrating it can be when team members don't cooperate.

Then, I had the students do a drawing activity with the person across from them. One partner had to explain to the other person how to draw their shape without letting him/her see it. Then we repeated the activity a second time. I'm sure you can see how much easier the second round was! :) I had the students introduce themselves and share something the other person might not know, since some students knew each other either not as well or not at all.

Drawing Activity: Round 1





Drawing Activity: Round 2




I wanted to use the intellectual need principle to motivate some of the early definitions that we are going to talk about with functions. The numbers are purposely written in all different directions, so students don't know which way is up (why you need the axes). A lot of students used coordinates to describe the graphs the second time, and I asked if any of them had trouble understanding each other or had to explain it a different way. This emphasizes the importance of consistent language.

Finally, I had students "notice and wonder" about their impressions of the first day. (I know I read this about the first day somewhere else, but I can't remember who it was.) The homework was to read the course policies (I gave a video option, too) and then notice and wonder about them. That way, I introduced the structure and had a way not to read the syllabus at students for 30 minutes. (I plan on doing the same thing in my Algebra 1 class, but in class.)

Some students noticed I was enthusiastic. That's a first, since I get quite a bit of feedback about my monotone voice. I must be doing something that's doing a better job of showing my enthusiasm. (Several evaluations I've gotten have something to the point of "Zach is really enthusiastic about math. He should share this enthusiasm more with his students.") Maybe it's that I've gotten more confident, and I also have become really passionate about what I'm trying to sell.

A lot of students wondered if the class will be hard. I will ask them a follow-up question of why they wonder if it will be hard on day 2. That way, I can get an idea of what fears they might have and/or what other needs they might have.

Algebra 1/Foundations of Algebra

Two out of these three classes are co-taught. I am already worried about several of the students. I know I am going to really have to make an effort to build relationships with some of the students in these classes. I know I have work to do in that aspect of my teaching. I've built great relationships with the students that like me and the students who will do what I ask them, but I need to work on building better relationships with the more "difficult" students. It's something I really want to make a more conscious effort of this year.

In order to try to start building relationships, I used this activity. It led to some really good conversations. We had to take care of a few other housekeeping things during the classes, but I think it was helpful that a lot of the time was dedicated to helping students feel comfortable with each other.

I'm really excited for this year, even though last year was a more difficult one. That's significant though, because the last time I had a difficult year, I was dreading going back the next year. I've drawn a lot of strength from the #MTBoS, and from some of my students who have really reminded me why I teach. They've inspired another goal of mine, which is to do a better job of showing gratitude. I want to write at least one nice note to someone every day.

Assuming Positive Intent

My wife and I had our driveway replaced about a month ago. As the driveway was dug out and framed, our next door neighbor randomly approached my father-in-law on a Saturday morning about the driveway not being six inches off the property line. He comes in and says "What a bitch!" and my wife agreed as well.

On Monday, she leaves a note on our doorstep asking us to call her about it. Now my wife is really pissed, and I kind of agree with her at this point. Resorting to passive-aggressive behavior? Not communicating directly to our faces? She makes me call the neighbor. I do, and it's fine, but both of us are still quite irritated. My wife says that she won't talk to her.

On Thursday, a couple of days after the pour was completed, I ran into her outside. She told me how beautiful our driveway looked, and that she asked them for a quote to do her parents' driveway. She did seem genuinely concerned about us, and she said she had left the note because she was leaving for an early flight and didn't think we were awake. Apparently, she thought she was doing us a favor, and, right or wrong, believing that might have lessened a lot of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

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A seminar I attended that same week brought this idea to front of my mind, since it involved several instances of using a "Critical Friends" structure. Many of the Critical Friends structures have an agreement or norm of "Assume positive intent" in place. By nature, Critical Friends is designed for feedback, and sometimes criticism can be taken the wrong way. But, we have to assume positive intent in order to make sure a respectful environment is preserved. (Plus, it's natural to get defensive when we receive criticism.)

How often in school do we fail to assume positive intent? Every attempt to shoot down an educational reform seems to stem from a negative statement about students.

Reform: Accepting late work
Rebuttal: If we accept late work, students won't have any reason to turn it in on time.

Reform: Not counting homework, attendance, behavior, etc. in their grade.
Rebuttal: If we don't grade it, then they won't ever do it (especially homework.)

Reform: Allowing students to re-submit assessments
Rebuttal: Students won't study the first time.

Reform: No grades
Rebuttal: Students won't have to do anything, so they won't.

Reform: Technology
Rebuttal: Students will just play games and Snapchat people all the time.

Reform: Inquiry learning
Rebuttal: The students can't handle it, or they'll complain that I'm not teaching them.

Reform: Giving students more autonomy, freedom, etc.
Rebuttal: Students will abuse it and run all over us

Reform: Doing a certain lesson
Rebuttal: My students can't do that.

Reform: Students should be able to learn whatever they want.
Rebuttal: Students will just play video games or do nothing all day.

Is it any surprise, then, when our lack of positive intent rubs off on the students and they don't trust us?

Yes, a lot of the rebuttals above are legitimate concerns, not beneficial to student learning, and actually have happened in my experience. But, when you look at the benefits of the more progressive ideas, they really seem like they would be worth it and would help students develop into competent and successful adults. The students just need some support from us.

I think we need to re-frame our thinking (kind of like this thing I saw about re-framing of problems). Instead of "students won't ____________ (negative statement)," I think a better thing is to ask "how can we support students in _______________ (progressive idea.)" For example, instead of "Students can't handle more freedom," let's ask, "How can we support students in making responsible choices?" If we dare to call ourselves teachers, maybe we should try teaching them these things. Denying them opportunities to do things won't make them better at those things.

I wonder if my classroom (and maybe even my life in general) could be a happier place if I could establish a culture of assuming positive intent. Assuming positive intent could also help us to work with each other instead of against each other.

Quick Reflection after Reading Student Evaluations

Successes

I had a lot of favorable comments about the positive atmosphere and attitude created in the classroom. I've tried really hard all year long to sell this to the students, and I'm glad it was effective for a number of students.

I also had several students put that my tests were hard in the strengths column. I'm really glad to see students that want to push themselves and be challenged.

And several people said I was their favorite teacher. That label usually goes to the social studies teachers, so I will shamelessly bask in that flattery for a few minutes. :)

Things I need to improve and next steps:

I'll never make everyone happy all the time, and I shouldn't try. However, I can continue to develop ways to give students more choice in the classroom, and this can help make everybody happier more often.

The biggest "weakness" that students wrote over and over was that I didn't explain things clearly enough. I know there is much deeper meaning than that, and I am pretty sure what the real issue is. However, rather than assuming what it means, I need to directly ask the students, and I am contemplating how I will do that right now, so that I can take action immediately. I need to figure what need I am not meeting by "not explaining enough."

There were several negative comments about spending one class talking about an entire problem. This requires a culture change, and I need to figure out how to get students to buy into it more.

SBG-ish 3.0

Considerations, questions, concerns, and current ideas to resolve them as I work to make my grading and assessment practices evolve from the previous iteration.

Why am I doing this? Why do I care? The goal:

Give students more control over what they learn and how they demonstrate what they learn. Encourage them to take ownership. ENGAGE them!

Ever since transitioning to only grading summative assessments four years ago, it's been VERY test heavy. The spirit of the policy is supposed to be that a student's grade is representative of what they have learned in the course.

My fear is that the unintended message that we've sent is:

"It really doesn't matter what you've learned or how hard you try. The only way that you can demonstrate your learning is by solving these problems on this test on this day. (Unless you re-take it later. Even with re-takes, the same thing happens.) Regardless, the goal is not to learn math, but to accumulate the number of points needed to achieve your desired grade. You can play the 'tank and re-test' game. You can cheat as long as you don't get caught. If you're lucky enough to have 'a study guide that's just like the test,' just do that and not anything else. You can do very little most of the semester and then do massive re-takes at the end. Again, it doesn't matter what you've learned. As long as you have enough points, it's okay."

Jon Hasenbank's use of indicators kind of helped guide my thinking about how to use standards and learning targets. We've used learning targets (of course written in student friendly "I can" statements!) since I've been at my current school (I think I actually brought the template we use from my pre-service courses), but they've always seemed kind of shallow, merely a laundry list of skills. How my understanding has evolved is that the "I can" statements should not be the learning targets, but should be the indicators of meeting them. The actual learning targets should be the Common Core Standards, because those explain what we actually want students to know. Common Core calls for a combination of Procedural Fluency and Conceptual Understanding, so I thought it was important to separate the two, and then create "I can" statements that would indicate understanding of the standard. I included a sample document below.


Main Concern #1: How do I make sure the evidence I'm seeing is legitimate (not "fuzzy") and definitely attributed to the student?

It's amazing the variety of answers you get when you ask a question that requires a written response. Then, as a teacher, I'm left with the task of judging whether or not the group of words that the student decided to collect together and write on his paper is an acceptable response or not.

It's really not that simple though. Depending on the student's writing skills, the student might have the right thinking and understand what she's supposed to, but it gets lost in translation when she writes it on the paper. Not to say that communication isn't super important, (It is!) but now I'm grading a student on writing and not accurately representing her mathematical knowledge with her grade. Responses might suggest that I didn't word the question well, which is difficult to figure out if the question hasn't been used on an assessment yet. Or, I could just train the students in advance to give the answer that I want and turn it into a useless memorization and regurgitation exercise. The goal is to see what a student is thinking, but I worry that judging it for a grade undermines that goal.

Therein lies the first major concern. Students' own evidence submissions could be either useless or total garbage. One submission clearly shows that the student didn't care about learning much from the assignment; they just tried to get it done and accumulate points. Another student spent ten hours on their submission, but the submission doesn't indicate any understanding or might have a lot of correct stuff on, but completely misses the point. Now we're both very frustrated, if not angry with each other. Practice and feedback will probably improve this issue, but I don't want to inflict frustration on students (or myself!) that isn't particularly helpful. We all already have enough stress to deal with. The "How do you know what/how much/if/to what level your students have learned?" question is crucial here. The problem is, it's difficult to get myself and students on the same page with what the answer to that question looks like.

An obvious worry of attributing evidence to the student is plagiarism. It could be very difficult to detect given the vast amount of videos out there. Busting a student in the act could be a very time-consuming and possibly fruitless venture. Also, the prevalence of Google and algebra manipulation tools give plenty of opportunities for students to mis-represent their understanding and avoid putting much thought and effort into their submission.

I think the metacognitive memoir format does well to address many of these concerns (although not necessarily the plagiarism), in forcing the student to articulate their thinking. For topics that are more symbolic in nature, I require students to communicate clear connections between class activities, previous knowledge and topics, etc., so that even if Google or Wolfram Alpha finds its way into the students' work, there still has to be some degree of understanding visible.

It's non-negotiable that the procedural fluency indicators need to be done in front of me. The conceptual understanding is where I feel I could give students more flexibility. But, I still think I would like to see students do some deeper conceptual assessment items in class, too. I also wonder if I need to have more specific rubrics for communication and articulating connections with observable behaviors indicative of the different levels.

Dealing with this concern effectively is huge, as it is unfair to future teachers (and the students, too!) if they just get passed along without learning what they were supposed to.

Main Concern #2: Is the format/layout, etc. understandable for students?

So I'm a kid who struggles a lot with my executive functioning and "student skills" in general, not to mention that I read below grade level. The point of learning targets, objectives, whatever, is to clearly communicate a goal and/or help students focus on what they should be doing.

I think it could work, as long as I consistently used the document explicitly and showed students where we were in reference to the document. I might also have them mark dates on the document. Perhaps there are also ways to link the document to students' notes (if they primarily use Notability for note-taking), or they could make a table of contents and number the pages in their physical notebook. I would also need to support students in self-assessment, which is very difficult. (I don't think I've practiced this with them enough.)

The beauty is that ideally, students working on the same task might be working on different learning targets or indicators at the same time, but this would concern a lot of people, especially those who have a very linear view of math education. I'm not sure how to deal with that.

Main Concern #3: How do I deal with the logistics in place in a traditional grading system?

The biggest areas here are weekly athletic eligibility and a student knowing how they are doing.

I think the best solution here is to set a time limit until a student's current level gets locked in (still with opportunity to re-submit/provide more evidence.) Probably the most reasonable would be about two weeks past when assessment would be expected. The problem with this is that could be 4-5 weeks before a student who isn't performing has an actual consequence to deal with. This isn't necessarily the biggest problem with honors students, but in a regular class this could be a f-ing disaster. "You don't technically have an F right now, but you would have an F, and you'll have an F when I put the score in next Friday" doesn't seem to incite action as "You have an F right now" does. (However, you could make the case that "You have an F right now" has other equally or more damaging effects.)

I also wonder what an efficient way of parent communication of student progress would look like. Ideally, the student would be the best vehicle for this, but that's not always feasible. Maybe a portfolio or learning log kind of thing would be best, but it needs to be something that will engage students and be genuinely beneficial, not just a task I have to do because the teacher said so.

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So, that's my working description of my system. It will likely change, and I'm not sure to what extent I'll get to use it in my co-taught classes and courses I teach with other teachers (which leaves two classes). I still plan on using the rubric in the same ways I have been and cross-referencing between levels and percentages the same way.