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...