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Million-Dollar Questions

I was at a meeting yesterday when we discussed several million dollar questions:

• How do we get the students to work as hard as the teachers?
• Specifically, what can we do as a school/teaching staff to create an environment where students will move themselves from "don't-ers" to "do-ers" (don't do what they should to do what they should)?
• How can we motivate students on a wider scale than one-on-one? Or even one-on-thirty?

I wish I could say that we came up with million-dollar answers to these questions. What I can say is that we started a dialogue about solutions. In my small group, we established critera for what these solutions would do. Some groups started brainstorming a few ways we could start doing these things.

Overall, my take-away is that there is no million-dollar answer. It takes time and effort, and it always will take time and effort. No one activity or action or process will work. It's going to take a multi-faceted approach that is constantly revised and tweaked. And what works here may not work on our other campus or at any other school. It's about knowing your kids, and trying and trying and trying until you find something that works.

Project Reflections - All Stars

My students are finishing up an "All stars" project in which they were each assigned six athletes, all playing the same position, to analyze. They had to write equations of lines for each player and use them to infer information about the player and predict how the player would do in the future.

Positives about this project:

• Because I let them help me choose which sports we did, many of them were immediately interested in the project.
• The repetition involved in analyzing six players helped them really master writing an equation of a line when given two points.
• I worked in not only finding x- and y-intercepts (with some nice review of solving equations) but also a review of making predictions using an equation of a line, which was in the last project too. I hope they are starting to see the ways in which an equation can be useful.

Negatives about this project:

• I need to use real information about the players next time. When the students can immediately tell the information is made up, it takes away from their interest (thus negating the first positive). Yes, it would be an investment of time on my part to find the real data. But I think it would pay off in terms of my students' buy-in.
• This is a LONG project. The repetition, while great for skill mastery, takes a lot of time. Even though I remembered not having enough time last year and built in more time this year, I still had to push the deadline back several times in order to keep it reasonable.
  
• Individual work for this project is key. Since I didn't put the kids into groups until most of their work was done, some of them will never make it that far. Normally, they have someone encouraging them, prodding them, to get their work done. Without a group counting on them, some of them don't have the self-motivation to get the work done.
  

When technology breaks

We had server problems today, especially during one of my classes when the server was down school-wide for pretty much the entire period. I noticed some interesting things happen when this occurred:
First of all, I was happy with my ability to roll with it - even though my lesson plan for today relied on technology for the whole period, I came up with a workable back-up plan as soon as I started to realize something was wrong.
I think more interesting to me was my student's inability to roll with it - they were at a loss, completely. First, they complained that it was taking longer than usual to log in - but didn't connect that to something being wrong. They were happy for the excuse to fool around for a few minutes, thinking that the computers would fix themselves and be up in no time. As I realized there was a bigger problem at play, I was simultaneously trying to alert our IT support of the problem and trying to alert my students to the fact that we needed to change our plans. Interestingly, several students did not seem to realize this was a system-wide problem and thought it was only their computer that wasn't working. (I ask myself - are they just that self-centered? Did they not look around and notice the trend? Are they not good at seeing patterns?) In fact, even after the problem was solved, all day I had students telling me about the problem they'd had in such and such class in the morning, unaware that it was a school-wide breakdown that had occurred. I can't help but wonder about their critical reasoning and pattern recognition skills after a day like this!

Second Year Insights

Being a second-year teacher, I am always fighting the urge to compare everything to last year. Sometimes, I don't feel like I have improved enough and still have so far to go before I can really consider myself a successful teacher. Luckily, the last few days have not been like that.

Last year, my students really struggled with equations of lines. Looking back, I thought I taught them too fast and didn't include enough examples. In order to go through the different cases, my examples got complicated way too quickly.

So this year, I kept that in mind. I added more examples, increasing complexity much more gradually. I split it into two days. And.... voila!! My students, by and large, get it! They still get stuck on occasion, but I am getting much fewer questions, and better questions, than I got last year. I love this feeling of success!

Slope

I feel like my students are once again struggling to understand slope. I know that they struggled with this last year, so I presented it in different ways this year:

1. in the context of a real-problem, as rate of change (how fast my hair grows)
2. through an online reading with lots of illustrations, along with questions to guide their reading
3. an in-class discussion of what they had learned and multiple examples

The good news is, some of them get it. They can identify positive and negative slopes with ease. But give them two points and ask for the slope.... and most will get it wrong. I've got to move on soon (like, Monday) to equations of lines, but if they can't get the slope right their whole equation will end up wrong. Any ideas? How do others present slope?

A Hair Problem

In the style of dy/dan's WCYDWT...


How long is long enough?

My hair has grown quite long since the beginning of last school year. I realized recently that it might be almost long enough for me to cut off and donate to have a wig made. However, I’m starting to get annoyed with how long it is. What I want to know is: How fast is my hair growing? How much longer will it take to grow long enough? I don’t want to have to cut it much shorter than it was in the first picture because I look silly with really short hair.

August 26, 2008

October 28, 2009

Why I teach

Last night I had a wonderful moment that helped me remember why I'm in this job. It's hard sometimes in the day-to-day grind to keep my sights on the bigger picture.

I have a student who started the year off by doing absolutely nothing. Every once in a while, he might put in a few minutes of work, but for the most part, all he did was clown.

As the year has progressed, I've started to see small changes. More work was being done, although usually late, and the quality was improving.

Then, we hit a wall. He didn't like who he was grouped with on a project (others who were not living up to potential) and saw no point in trying since he was convinced that he would fail no matter what. I spent an entire class period debating and pushing, telling him I would never give up on him and never let up. If it meant telling him every two minutes for two weeks to get to work, I would do it.

That day, it was like talking to a brick wall. It didn't seem to matter what I said, he was not going to do it. I was starting to worry about what was going to happen if this streak continued. And then... he came in to class the next day a changed person. He worked with his team and then did a great job. He felt success, which was good. And he continued to keep up more and more with his work.

Yesterday after school, I entered grades for a few assignments he had turned in (late, but without prompting). And his grade changed to a C for the first time!! So, when I saw him with his parents waiting to talk to another teacher at Parent-Teacher conferences, I told him to be sure to come see me. I ended up being their first conference, and the grin on his face - let's just say it's enough to keep me going for a while. I know most of their night was probably filled with hearing how he's struggling, and it felt great to be able to say (and mean 100%) "Good job. Keep it up."

What feels different?

As I reflect back on teaching this past week, I think my most important revelation came sometime during the day on Friday. As I was walking around answering questions and watching kids work, it suddenly hit me - this feels like PBL. My students were actively engaged in the task at hand, relatively interested in it - at least enough to keep working on it. They were following directions and asking good questions. In most cases, they were actually working together with their partners.
And so, as I continued to think about this feeling of success, I began wondering - what made this week/this project a success? Why did it feel different than the previous project last week? How exactly did it feel different.
Here are some of the answers I came up with:

• It helps that most of the math skills in this project are review for most of the students. They might need a quick refresher, but they are mostly capable of completing the required math with little to no help from me.
• Step-by-step directions - with instructions to follow each step of the way, students are no longer questioning "What are we supposed to be doing?" - or, when they do, find that my response is simply "Check the agenda."
• Resources built-in - I pre-assembled resources to help with anything I foresaw questions about - resources that they could use without needing to ask for help (notes to read, videos, website links). Students were able to answer many of the small questions they had without resorting to my help, leaving just the big ones needing my assistance. To further emphasize this "you can figure it out yourself," I would like to impose a limit on how many questions can be asked in future projects. I want them to really think about whether it is something they can figure out for themselves, or whether they truly do need my help.
• Ability to move ahead - having the next day's directions posted, and enrichment activities prepared, allowed my higher-achieving students to move ahead and keep working. This way they too were engaged all the way through the period.

Now that I have some ideas about what has led to this project's (so far) success, I will have to consider how to continue these successes in my next projects.

Hello World!

Hello, and welcome to my blog. This is my first attempt at blogging, and I hope that I have something to contribute to the blogosphere.

I'm a second year teacher at a New Tech High School. We emphasize real-world applications through a project-based learning approach. We also use technology as a learning tool for students - I have 26 computers in my classroom for students to use as needed. As an algebra teacher, I am always on the lookout for new and unique applications that I can use to help my students see connections. I hope to share about what I'm doing and reflect on my teaching practices.