Total participation

A book that I read over spring break that has since guided my approach to whole group instruction is

Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner by Persida Himmele and William Himmele.  They make the point that if only a few students raise their hands and participate in class discussions, then you only know if those few are learning the material. After spring break I started explicitly pairing up students for buddy talks, and each pair got a white board.  Several time during the lesson, I ask the students to talk over a problem/idea with their shoulder buddy, and then write their answer on the white board.  I don't proceed until every white board has something written on it.

Did it work?  Once the kids believed I wouldn't continue till every white board had something written on it, the kids  did write on the white boards.  If I put myself in their position, such a requirement would irritate me if the question itself wasn't engaging -- and that's the challenge.  Some of the kids did discuss more with their partners, and others just wrote on the board without discussion.

Interpreting volume...

I got a call out today at a staff meeting for my end of unit activity for volume where I had the kids do an interpretive performance of volume.  They had 7 minutes to plan, and then up to 1 minute to perform a dance, a skit, a pose -- any representation of volume they chose.  The kids loved it, and they did creative things -- some illustrating the lxwxh formula, and others being "the volume inside the box."  The kids on math IEPs weren't there, but everyone else demonstrated that they had an understanding of volume.

Brain breaks...

In yesterday's leap day training, a teacher at the school mentioned using music and "brain breaks" to help with long periods of whole group instruction.  The teachers in the audience asked her to turn off the background music while she was talking, but I have been looking for an opening to try to use music during independent work in my class, and starting Tuesday, math work will be done to tunes.

I will also try the brain breaks -- don't know if the 5th graders will be too cool to stand up and move around.  Maybe...

Solids

Group work: Book notes from "Smarter Together"...

I picked up a copy of "Smarter Together: Collaboration and Equity in the Elementary Math Classroom" by Featherstone, Crespo, Jilk, Oslund, Parks and Wood because I do not know how to create group work assignments where everyone participates. 

The book calls the type of teaching done in groups as complex instruction.

Chapter 1 talks about the value of groupwork in math:  that several heads (working well together) are better than one:  they can draw on a much broader combined set of knowledge.

Chapter 2 discusses the aspect of groupwork that most bothers me:  unless it is carefully planned and executed and supported, the high status students in the group call the shots, and the low status students disengage and/or their contributions are not valued.

Chapter 3 introduces the idea of using assigned roles in groups to help level the status differences.  I have seen these used, but so far without a lot of success.  The authors describe 4 primary roles, but also include some others that I think could help with success.  The 4 primary roles are Facilitator, who gets the team started, organized, and makes sure everyone understands the assignment; Resource Monitor who collects, cares for and returns supplies, and is the contact person for the teacher; Recorder/Reporter who checks that all team members record the work, and organizes the team's report; and the Team Caption/Includer/Questioner who encourages checks that everyone is doing their role, encourages the group, and works to settle disputes.  The additional/substitute roles mentioned are Timekeeper and Harmonizer, who keeps the peace, and Skeptic, who keeps the group on track by questioning.  For students who have trouble sticking to their role, there is the Rover role, where they make a report on how all the groups are doing, but also have a chance to observe groups where everyone does perform their role.  Each role can be given sentence stems for the kinds of questions or encouragement or push that is expected from their position.

In addition to roles, group work is done with a set of norms:
1. No talking outside the group.
2.  Helping does not mean giving answers.
3. No one is done till everyone is done.
4. You have the right to ask for help, and the responsibility to help.
5. Follow your gruop role.
6. Call the teacher for group questions.
7. Listen and talk equally.
8. Show respect to one another.
9. Everyone helps clean up.
10.  I can't...Yet!

The chapter includes a  great student intro activity which is also an intro activity to the group roles, which is to create a Venn diagram of the kids in the group and what they have in common, or not.  

Math exit tickets...

In order to understand more about what students were understanding and not, I have started using an exit ticket in math.  The first part gives answers to the in-class work, and asks them to correct their work.  The second part asks them how well they feel they understand the learning target, and the third part is a followup problem or two.

So far it as given me good information for instruction for the higher level learners in math.  I can review their answers to the followup problem while they're putting away their math book, and have a 5 second conversation with them if they made a mistake.  They quickly understand the mistake, and the feedback is close to immediate.  They also like the opportunity to check their work - and this is usually positive feedback for them.

The students who struggle more tend not to check their work, so I don't have feedback on how far they got, or which ones they got right or wrong.   Since my CT does not use the sheets, there may be some misunderstanding about the expectations.  Also because I want them to check their work with the textbook open (so they can see the original problem), they are tempted to keep on with the assigned problem solving. 

So the exit ticket is so far less helpful for me in figuring out how to help the struggling students.  There is also the difficulty that they probably need more help than the 10 second interaction with the non-struggling students, but my CT keeps closely to the pacing guide.  And, she and I alternate math lessons, so I don't plan the next days lesson when I have taught.

All this will change in spring quarter.  I'll be doing more teaching, and I'll tweak my exit tickets.

Blogging and communication....

With a year of blogging behind me, it is a good time to think about how I use it, and how I find it valuable as a teacher.

Some of the blogs I write are about something new I've learned (usually tech) which I want to share with the world.  I think of these as the most useful, even though it is often information that can be found a million places on the web.  They have been curated by me, and I'm not a bad curator of tech.

Other times I blog about lessons I have taught or about questions I have as I plan for a lesson.  These are mainly to fulfill the program blogging requirement.  In blogging I am just recording the thoughts I've had, but the blogging itself does not advance my thinking, and my questions are mostly ones that can only be answered with classroom experience.

I wish I blogged about ideas I had read about, or ah-ha moments of making connections, but I don't.  I've read most of the readings for coursework, and many outside, as well as doing the assignments, but I don't feel I've had the time/space/experience to synthesize the information, and so no blogs like this from me yet.

I have imagined sharing great lesson plans in the future through a blog.  But though I occasionally look for lesson plans online for ideas, I find myself agreeing with Spencer from A Sustainable Start that great lesson plans are great because of the context of students in which you teach them, and don't necessarily translate their greatness to another class. 

I have tried to follow several blogs outside the cohort, but I find my interest uneven.  I may have started following a blog because of a particular post, but then find the subsequent ones don't match my interests.

Which brings me to twitter.

I am recently convinced on the helpfulness of twitter.  My ah-ha moment with twitter was setting up Tweetdeck and Hootsuite columns to report particular hashtags.  The hashtags I set up do consistently reflect my interests, and from them I get to blog posts and other resources that I want to read.

As to my contributing to the conversation in the cloud, and not just taking from it, I feel that I do not yet have much to add to it.  I understand the tools now, and with a little more experience and a little more synthesis time, I will have more to give back.

This quarter a lot of my posts were about teaching math, and I also commented on other cohort blogs about math and/or exit tickets.  For example, here and here.

Student voice

I am struggling in my placement to figure out group work and student voice, but occasionally something goes really right, so there is hope.

A couple weeks ago, I taught a literacy lesson on writing a thank you note.  The kids had been away for 3 days to an outdoor education camp, and the lesson was the write thank you notes to the parent chaperones.  I structured my lesson straight out of Routman, and had a skeleton letter and lots of support.

I started the lesson by putting a huge piece of contruction paper at each table group, and asking the table group to jot down their favorite memories, and then we posted the posters around the room to inspire and remind everyone of the details of the trip. At that point, the kids were hooked.  Everyone at the table group participated.  Their was no differentiation in status or falling into expected roles.  The kids validated each other's memories, and added on, and had fun. 

Another part of group work and student voice, that I am slowly remembering to make part of my teaching is the turn and talk.  Even when I plan out a lesson with specific places to include a turn and talk, I forget.  My CT tells me that it isn't even important that they talk about the lesson -- kids just need a chance to be talking every few minutes in order to get the wiggles out.  I've started making my self larger reminders, but it does work well, so hopefully I will just internalize it with time..

Spreaker to record podcasts from your smartphone...

Absences and new students midyear...

One of my biggest bugaboos as a parent has been the difficulty in catching up with missed work and instruction when my daughter has been sick and absent from school. In younger grades, she was usually excused from the assignments she had missed, but there was also no real support for her to learn the content she had missed.  Now, in middle school, she is expected to make up all the work, and to find out what the work was by asking classmates.  In some classes this is easier than others:  she has friends to ask, and the work is from the textbook.  But at other times it is harder because she has no good friends in the class, or the work was a worksheet of which she can not easily get a copy.

Students who arrive midyear go through all this times ten.

I wish classrooms had a student job  to collect homework assignments and materials for the kids who are absent.  Since there will almost always be at least one student absent, it makes sense to build support for those students into each day's lesson plans.

Similarly, since most classes get 1 or 2 new students in the course of the year, why not plan for them from day 1?  The class could create extra reading, math, and science folders and so forth to give like a gift to new students when they arrive.

Slow workers...

A couple of the kids in my main placement are slow, but accurate, workers.  In math, for example, they usually are able to solve the problems, but if the class is assigned 20 textbook problems and  then followup work, they will only get through 5-10 of the textbook problems.  My CT has modified their assignment so they are only asked to do every other textbook problem, and that is usually all they finish in math, if even that.

I realize that I don't understand why they are slow - is it stamina, focus, motivation, or something else?  As I think of these kids heading to middle school, where classes are increasingly tracked, I suspect they'll end up on the lower track even though they understand the material.

Should these kids have speed goals, or is that completely inappropriate?  Is speed developmental?  A good place to start in figuring it out will be to ask them...

More math instruction pondering...

So, I am struggling to keep math whole group instruction short.  My first couple of math lessons were long, with lots of eliciting of student thinking, and yet the kids still did poorly on the assessment from the curriculum that follows each lesson, and my CT suggested I shoot for 10 minutes max on whole group instruction.

My new thinking is to start each lesson with a warmup -- something to get the kids thinking about the concept before the group teach starts.  I think of it a little like the activation of background knowledge that we talked about in literacy.  Then perhaps the group teach could start with kids already focussed on the topic, and it could move a little quicker.

Of course this seems like a no-brainer, but part of the challenge is that the math group lesson is taught when the kids come back from recess, while they eat their snacks.  Maybe the warmup activity could be done by table groups, but my class does not have a culture of effective group work...  But that's another struggle for another day.

Personal abacus...

I bought this bracelet at a craft fair last fall, because I liked the idea of it as a mini abacus on a bracelet. I think knitters make and use them to keep track of stitches or rows or something.  I've also seen them with several strands of 10 beads.  Here's a cute video of a kid giving instructions on making one.

It's back to my main placement tomorrow, with an eye over these next two weeks on how to set up some procedures while I am teaching that can meet the requirements of the edTPA.  While I expect I'll be tired of the rubrics by May, right now I think they'll be useful in helping me negotiate some room to teach in my own style.

Handing over iPad to a student...

I was so excited this week to find out how to lock the iPad to the current app (directions below).  I have been wanting to hand my iPad over to students to use (unsupervised) with ExplainEverything, but have worried that they might want to investigate everything I have on my iPad.

In my last week in my placement, the kids had an online research project, and it was taking the netbooks forever to login to the network, so I tried my iPad and it was fast, so I gave it to a group of kids to use.  Meanwhile on the other side of the room, a group of girls had managed to login with their netbook, and they had interrupted their research to search google for  "what is [one of the girls names] good at?"  It turns out that, somewhere in the world, someone with that name is good at some things that are not rated G.  I'm not sure if the school network would have let them click through to the site, but they sure could see the list of the search results. The kids were redirected back to the research project, and I'm happier handing over my iPad having some control over what the kids do with it (which isn't to say that I think kids shouldn't use google, but that perhaps they need closer supervision and direction when they do).

To lock the iPad to the current app: go to Settings, General, Accessibility, and then scroll down to Guided Access. Flip the switch and tap Set Passcode to create a four-digit passcode. Next, find the app you want to give the kids access to  and launch it. Once it comes up,  tap the home button three times. At that point you can disable buttons and portions of the screen.  To leave the app, you would have to enter your passcode.

Project Learning Tree...

I get so caught up in class and homework and chores and my to-do list that it is easy to forget to go outside and just notice.  The Project Learning Tree workshop was a good reminder for myself as myself and also as a teacher of the richness of getting outside.  When we hosted out math buddies this past week, my group was happy to be outside, and they were willing to count and estimate boards on the boardwalk, listen with closed eyes to bird calls, pick through a compost bin looking for worms, and compare the speed of running forward and backward. 

I took a biology class to qualify for the teaching program, and one of the assignments was to go to 5 different places, and just notice till you had a list of 20 living things you had seen at each place.  My lists ran to hundreds, and I was grateful for the assignment because I enjoyed doing it, and wouldn't have on my own.  Chances are I'll give a similar assignment to my future students...

Keeping whole group instruction short in math...

I taught several math classes in the last few weeks at my placement, with the last one officially observed by my CT. 

The primary feedback of my CT was to spend less time on whole group instruction. She advocated moving swiftly to small group instruction, and delivering the bulk of the content there.  I'm uneasy with this because it means leaving the 3rd of 5 small groups with 20-30 minutes of independent work when they may not have the content knowledge to do it.  (Groups 4 & 5 probably could).

For the next time I teach, I'm wondering about keeping whole group instruction short, but having a stack of hint cards for the problems that kids could pull from.  I'd like to have the kids create hint cards themselves once they understand the concept.  Perhaps this might get to the application or analysis level of Bloom's taxonomy (applying the concept to a new problem, and analyzing what's important?).  The hint cards could be used later with absent students, or for the following year...

Part of the math lesson:  to make an equivalent fraction game.  Here's one:

Math talks at home...

As we talk about multi-cultural education and also about math talks, I wonder about the different approaches to solving math problems.  My take-away from the math talks so far, is that any accurate discussion of strategies promotes mathematical literacy: indeed the goal seems to be to tease out a variety of strategies for any one problem.  Nevertheless there also seems to be an emphasis on teaching the language and techniques of the current curriculum, and not to honor the techniques of parents, with the idea being that often parents know the algorithm, but not the reasoning behind it.  Yet, the most powerful math discussion I can imagine is parents and kids sitting down together to sort out why or how an algorithm works, or to convince each other of the validity of the approach taught in school.

Incidentally, it is fun to see the varieties of notation for long division from other countries: long division notation for several countries.

Question of the week: How to engage "high-achieving" students in math?

I expect this week that I will be teaching a math lesson which will be observed by my field mentor.

The standard procedure in my 5th grade math class is:
1.  Whole class direct instruction using provided curriculum
2.  Small groups are called up one by one to work with the teacher, and the other students work on assigned problems from the book.
3.  Those who finish early can use a computer to play online math games or can find a partner and play a paper math game.  The first 6 who finish are allowed to work in the shared space outside the classroom.

The same six always finish first. There are students who work hard and sometimes finish early, but never get to go to the shared space.   The computers are slow to connect to the network, and aren't reliably charged... etc.  There are a lot of reasons why I think this system is inefficient and unfair.

But what do you do with the kids who do finish first?  How do you motivate everyone to work hard, and not reward only those who finish first?  How do you keep the class humming, but ensure that it doesn't get too loud to disrupt the small groups, and those still doing independent work?

That is my question of the week.

Right now my thoughts are towards finding ways for them to work with other students, pushing the ZPD.  Or, pushing them to examine the math concept from multiple perspectives, as we do in math class, and also discussed here.