reflection – Page 5

Building a need for algebraic reasoning – how can computers help?

I hear this all the time, and it drives me up a wall.

I haven’t solved for x in years, and I’m doing just fine.

Few people realize that while they aren’t using algebraic properties in their daily lives, they use the analog concept of finding missing values all the time. You won’t win this argument with most people though. It just doesn’t seem like algebra.

As math teachers, we also get annoyed when students are able to do this with nothing in between:

Certainly in a Calculus class, this should not surprise us – at that level we would expect an ability to eyeball the solution. At the other end of the post elementary math progression, however, when we are teaching two step equations for the first time, our response might be this: “Yes, you got that one, but I could give you one that has negative numbers or (GASP!) decimals or fractions in it. Then what would you do? This is why it’s important that you pay attention to this lesson. You have to do it this other way in order to get credit.”

I’ve had this conversation, and it has always made me feel ridiculous. It’s an arbitrary and crappy argument. It might be a valid one if standardized (or your own) tests of algebraic concepts are involved, but using tests as a motivation for doing anything makes the whole enterprise feel cheap, even when doing so needs to happen.

The bigger issue is that it perpetuates the reputation of math teachers and mathematicians as protectors of a sacred bag of secrets that nobody outside of a math classroom will need. It also presents a problem of artificiality. If I can suddenly make something harder by adding fractions or decimals, does doing so make it any easier for me to assess whether my students know what they are doing in solving an equation? I think we haven’t done a great job of building in the need for algebra, especially in light of what computers can do. I’ve never had a student sarcastic and comfortable enough with me to do this, but bear with me. The theoretical argument in the back of my mind to what I said in response to the student I described earlier is this:

Really teach? With that college degree of yours, you could make up a question that I can’t use my knowledge of arithmetic to solve? Impressive. I guess that even though I did everything my previous teachers told me to do – memorize multiplication tables, learn to add fractions with like/unlike denominators, draw lots of pie charts demonstrating equivalent fractions, AND draw lots of connect-the-dot dinosaurs as reviews of plotting in the coordinate plane, I still need you. Glad to be here. Oh, your tie is crooked. At least I can still help you out with that.

Furthermore, I wonder about the challenge of motivating algebra given that Wolfram Alpha, CAS, and even the lowly TI-83 solver can solve equations without breaking a sweat.

I’m not teaching introductory algebra right now, but the thinking I’ve done on how computers put the thinking back into process has me wondering how motivating the need for Algebra could be different, and better given how easy it is to compute these days. The most basic way that people interact with numbers is through tables and graphs – is it possible to motivate algebra through this familiar idea? Can we use the computer to compute a bunch of stuff, and see what it tells us?

Some food for thought:

This is precisely the sort of thing we are looking for when we are solving an equation, but it’s rare that we think about it this way. It’s also something that most people outside of a classroom will do with a table of values in a newspaper or a website, for example. It is typically for more practical reasons (predicting value of a stock, figuring out when a bus will arrive at our location from a schedule that doesn’t have every stop, etc) than simply finding ‘x’ as we ask students to do in the classroom. Is this algebra? Staring at a table of values is tedious, but I know people that would rather do this than solve an equation or do anything that smells like school math.

Again, in our adult lives, we make estimations from given information from a table or graph from time to time, but few adults actually call this algebra. Is it obvious to an adult that changing the interval in the right way would allow the exact answer to be found? Is it obvious to a student? It’s a subtle point here, but I think it’s the sort of reasoning we want our students to be capable of doing. Is that type of understanding something inherently important in algebraic reasoning? How’s that going for us now?

We know there are algorithmic ways to solve this one, but I’ve already said here and in previous posts that I want to get away from mathematical thinking as a bag of algorithms. How good of an answer to this can we get from a table? I don’t know about you, but I have yet to feel like I’ve taught well the idea of an irrational number in a good, intuitive way that doesn’t result in students memorizing tricks. I think this hints at this concept in ways that is inaccessible without using computers. Even on a calculator, it’s difficult to focus in on solutions as smoothly as I think can be done with a table of rapidly computed values.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t teach properties of numbers and inverse operations in the context of solving equations algebraically. I think we need to do a better job of selling the idea of algebra as being an enhancement of what we already have built in to our brains. We estimate what time we need to cross the street to not get hit by a truck but also to minimize our time waiting. We know that if the high is 68 degrees at 3 PM, that it will probably be a nice temperature outside at one-o-clock. This way of feeling our way to a solution through intuition, however, is not the optimal way to solve problems, especially when our intuition is wrong. There needs to be a better way.

Our students (and many adults) often don’t know how to create tools to help them solve the problems they face. They choose to do things that are tedious because they don’t know a better way, and the math skills they have developed previously are disconnected and seem irrelevant as a result. We do understand the idea of computation, but we often aren’t good at doing it ourselves. If nothing else, it’s pushing people to become more confident that they know what they are looking at when we see a bunch of numbers together.

Playing with robots – a weekend well spent

This weekend marked the culmination of a few months of work from my robotics students. We traveled to Shanghai to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge tournament with 47 other teams. I got involved in FIRST nine years ago when teachers at my school in the Bronx tracked me down after hearing of my engineering background. They had just won the Rookie of the Year award the season before, and were excited to have an engineer around to help. Given that it was my first year teaching, I wasn’t able to be nearly as involved as I wanted to be. It was enough of a hook to get me to see how powerful programs like FIRST really are for working on the ‘demand’ side of the educational system, the problem-solving-hands-on-building stuff that makes students see what the end game of education can be. Playing with robots on a competition field is no more ‘real world’ than estimating the number of pennies in a pyramid, but the learning opportunities in both are rich and demanding. Nine years later, I am still as convinced as ever that these are the types of activities our students need to understand the context of the skills we teach them in our classrooms.

This weekend, we met stiff competition from our Chinese competitors. They built cascaded elevator systems, scissor lifts, and sensor systems that helped to play this year’s game, a tic-tac-toe variant played using colored rings on a set of horizontal pegs. More impressive for me was seeing the mentors noticeably bored and checking their phones while the students were the ones focused on tweaking their robots and fixing programming snafus.

This, however, was not our main challenge. The biggest issues that we faced were of our own creation – how to achieve consistency in our lifting mechanism using a web of zip-ties, or discovering just how unstable our own lifting mechanism was. The students were constantly sawing different parts of the robots off to make room for the solution to the last problem they created while trying to solve another. Clearing the complex residue of multiple good ideas to leave a simple, capable solution is the ultimate goal of a good design. The overall process of doing this is difficult, even with experience. They are early enough on the curve to know that there is much that they do not know though, and their positive and cheerful manner throughout was inspiring. Even after multiple technical issues and defeats on the field, they left the competition today feeling accomplished and full of ideas.

I was most inspired by my students’ reactions to seeing the clever designs of their Chinese counterparts. I have witnessed students wandering the pits at FIRST events and greeting unique and capable designs with accusation as the immediate reaction. “They could do that because they have so much more money” or “the mentors did all the work – it isn’t fair because we do everything on our team.” I understand the sentiment, but have always passed it off as being overly pessimistic. Some skilled teams make it look easy without always making obvious the associated level of effort required to execute such designs.

What made me particularly proud of my students this weekend was seeing them look at other designs and go through two stages of processing them. First, they would remark how cool it was that the team was able to solve the problem in such a unique way. Second, with some thinking about just how, they would say something along the lines of we could have done that.

While our ranking was closer to the bottom than I (or they) will reluctantly reveal, I don’t care much at this point. The team is young and will hopefully have more opportunities to learn and build together over the next couple of years. Their satisfaction was evident in watching the final matches with a clear sense of accomplishment, even while not being part of them. Their sense of togetherness is stronger than ever.

Our bus lost its headlights on the way back, forcing us to spend an hour and a half at a repair place while the driver and nine other people figured it out while the usual pattern of loud Mandarin was punctuated with hacking and drags off cigarettes. The team, meanwhile, procured a healthy supply of snacks and seemed content to sing along to music played off their school laptops. This is a close group that has only grown closer. Easily the highlight of the whole weekend right there.

The post where I remind myself that written instructions for computer tasks stink.

It’s not so much that I can’t follow written instructions. I’m human and I miss steps occasionally, but with everything written down, it’s easy to retrace steps and figure out where I went wrong if I did miss something. The big issue is that written instructions are not the best way to show someone how to do something. Text is good for some specific things, but defining steps for completing a task on a computer is not one of them.

Today I showed my students the following video at the start of class.
GEO-U6D2.1-Constructing Parallelogram in Geogebra

I also gave them this image on the handout, which I wrote last year, but students only marginally followed:

It was remarkable how this simple change to delivery made the whole class really fun to manage today.

Students saw exactly what I wanted them to produce, and how to produce it.
The arrows in the video identified one of the vocabulary words from previous lessons as it appeared on screen.
My ESOL students were keeping up (if not outpacing) the rest of the class.
The black boxes introduced both the ideas of what I wanted them to investigate using Geogebra, and simultaneously teased them to make their own guesses about what was hidden. They had theories immediately, and they knew that I wanted them to figure out what was hidden through the activity described in the video. Compare this to the awkwardness of doing so through text, where they have to guess both what I am looking for, and what it might look like. You could easily argue this is on the wrong side of abstraction.
I spent the class going around monitoring progress and having conversations. Not a word of whole-class direct instruction for the fifty minutes of class that followed showing the video. Some students I directed to algebraic exercises to apply their observations. Others I encouraged to start proofs of their theorems. Easy differentiation for the different levels of students in the room.

Considering how long I sometimes spend writing unambiguous instructions for an exploration, and then the heartbreak involved when I inevitably leave out a crucial element, I could easily be convinced not to try anymore.

One student on a survey last year critiqued my use of Geogebra explorations saying that it wasn’t always clear what the goal was, even when I wrote it on the paper. These exploratory tasks are different enough and more demanding than sitting and watching example problems, and require a bit more selling for students to buy into them being productive and useful. These tasks need to quickly define themselves, and as Dan Meyer suggests, get out of the way so that discovery and learning happens as soon as possible.

Today was a perfect example of how much I have repeatedly shot myself in the foot during previous lessons trying to establish a valid context for these tasks through written instructions. The gimmick of hiding information from students is not the point – yes there was some novelty factor here that may have led to them getting straight to work as they did today. This was all about clear communication of objectives and process, and that was the real power of what transpired today.

When things just work – starting with computers

Today’s lesson on objects in orbit went fantastically well, and I want to note down exactly what I did.

Scare the students:

Screen Shot 2013-02-05 at 3.23.59 PM http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news177.html

Push to (my) question – how close is that?

Connect to previous work:

The homework for today was to use a spreadsheet to calculate some things about an orbit. Based on what they did, I started with a blank sheet toward the beginning of class and filled in what they told me should be there.
orbit calculations
Some students needed some gentle nudging at this stage, but nothing that felt forced. I hate when I make it feel forced.

Play with the results

Pose the question about the altitude needed to have a satellite orbit once every twenty four hours. Teach about the Goal Seek function in the spreadsheet to automatically find this. Ask what use such a satellite would serve, and grin when students look out the window, see a satellite dish, and make the connection.

Introduce the term ‘geosynchronous’. Show asteroid picture again. Wait for reaction.

See what happens when the mass of the satellite changes. Notice that the calculations for orbital speed don’t change. Wonder why.

See what happens with the algebra.

See that this confirms what we found. Feel good about ourselves.

Wonder if student looked at the lesson plan in advance because the question asked immediately after is curiously perfect.

Student asks how the size of that orbit looks next to the Earth. I point out that I’ve created a Python simulation to help simulate the path of an object moving only under the influence of gravity. We can then put the position data generated from the simulation into a Geogebra visualization to see what it looks like.

Simulate & Visualize

Introduce how to use the simulation
Use the output of the spreadsheet to provide input data for the program. Have them figure out how to relate the speed and altitude information to what the simulation expects so that the output is a visualization of the orbit of the geosynchronous satellite.

Not everybody got all the way to this point, but most were at least at this final step at the end.

I’ve previously done this entire sequence starting first with the algebra. I always would show something related to the International Space Station and ask them ‘how fast do you think it is going?’ but they had no connection or investment in it, often because their thinking was still likely fixed on the fact that there is a space station orbiting the earth right now . Then we’d get to the stage of saying ‘well, I guess we should probably draw a free body diagram, and then apply Newton’s 2nd law, and derive a formula.’

I’ve had students tell me that I overuse the computer. That sometimes what we do seems too free form, and that it would be better to just get all of the notes on the board for the theory, do example problems, and then have practice for homework.

What is challenging me right now, professionally, is the idea that we must do algebra first. The general notion that the ‘see what the algebra tells us’ step should come first after a hook activity to get them interested since algebraic manipulation is the ultimate goal in solving problems.

There is something to be said for the power of the computer here to keep the calculations organized and drive the need for the algebra though. I look at the calculations in the spreadsheet, and it’s obvious to me why mass of the satellite shouldn’t matter. There’s also something powerful to be said for a situation like this where students put together a calculator from scratch, use it to play around and get a sense for the numbers, and then see that this model they created themselves for speed of an object in orbit does not depend on satellite mass. This was a social activity – students were talking to each other, comparing the results of their calculations, and figuring out what was wrong, if anything. The computer made it possible for them to successfully figure out an answer to my original question in a way that felt great as a teacher. Exploring the answer algebraically (read: having students follow me in a lecture) would not have felt nearly as good, during or afterwards.

I don’t believe algebra is dead. Students needed a bit of algebra in order to generate some of the calculations of cells in the table. Understanding the concept of a variable and having intuitive understanding of what it can be used to do is very important.

I’m just spending a lot of time these days wondering what happens to the math or science classroom if students building models on the computer is the common starting point to instruction, rather than what they should do just at the end of a problem to check their algebra. I know that for centuries mathematicians have stared at a blank paper when they begin their work. We, as math teachers, might start with a cool problem, but ultimately start the ‘real’ work with students on paper, a chalkboard, or some other vertical writing surface.

Our students don’t spend their time staring at sheets of paper anywhere but at school, and when they are doing work for school. The rest of the time, they look at screens. This is where they play, it’s where they communicate. Maybe we should be starting our work there. I am not recommending in any way that this means instruction should be on the computer – I’ve already commented plenty on previous posts on why I do not believe that. I am just curious what happens when the computer as a tool to organize, calculate, and iterate becomes as regular in the classroom as graphing calculators are right now.

Angry Birds Project – Results and Post-Mortem

In my post last week, I detailed what I was having students do to get some experience modeling quadratic functions using Angry Birds. I was at the 21CL conference in Hong Kong, so the students did this with a substitute teacher. The student teams each submitted their five predictions for the ratio of hit distance to the distance from the slingshot to the edge of the picture. I brought them into Geogebra and created a set of pictures like this one:

After learning some features of Camtasia I hadn’t yet used, I put together this summary video of the activity:

[wpvideo ysubHH3L]

I played the video, and the students were engaged watching the videos, but there was a general sense of dread (not suspense) on their faces as the team with the best predictions was revealed. This, of course, made me really nervous. They did clap for the winners when they were revealed, and we had some good discussion about modeling, which videos were more difficult and why, but there was a general sense of discomfort all through this activity. Given that I wasn’t quite able to figure out exactly why they were being so awkward, I asked them what they thought of the activity on a scale of 1 – 10.

They hated it.

I should have guessed there might be something wrong when I received three separate emails from the three members one team with results that were completely different. Seeing three members of one team work independently (and inefficiently) is something I’m pretty tuned in to when I am in the room, but this was bigger. It didn’t sound like there was much utilization of the fact that they were in teams. I need to ask about this, but I think they were all working in parallel rather than dividing up the labor, talking about their results, and comparing to each other.

Some things I want to remember about this:

I need to be a lot more aware of the level of my own excitement around activity in comparison to that of the students. I showed one of the shortened videos at the end of the previous class and asked what questions they really wanted to know. They all said they wanted to know where the bird would land, but in all honesty, I think they were being charitable. They didn’t really care that much. In the game, you learn shortly after whether the bird you fling will hit where you want it to or not. Here, they had to go through a process of importing a picture, fitting a parabola, and finding a zero of a function using Geogebra, and then went a weekend without knowing.
While it is true that using a computer made this task possible, and was more enjoyable than being forced to do this by hand, the relativity of this scale should be suspect. “Oh good, you’re giving me pain meds after pulling my tooth. Let’s do this again!”
A note about pseudocontext – throwing Angry Birds in to a project does not by itself does not necessarily engage students. It is a way in. I think the way I did this was less contrived than other similar projects I’ve seen, but that didn’t make it a good one. Trying to make things ‘relevant’ by connecting math to something the students like can look desperate if done in the wrong way. I think this was the wrong way.
I would have gotten a lot more mileage out of the video if I had stopped it here:

That would have been relevant to them, and probably would have resulted in turning this activity back around. I am kicking myself for not doing that. Seriously. That moment WAS when the students were all watching and interested, and I missed it.

Next time. You try and fail and reflect – I’m still glad I did it.

We went on to have a lovely conversation about complex numbers and the equation $latex x^{2}+4 = 0 $. One student immediately said that $ sqrt{-2} $ was just fine to substitute. Another stayed after class to explain why she thought it was a disturbing idea.

No harm done.

P.S. – Anyone who uses this post as a reason not to try these ideas out with their class and to instead slog on with standard lectures has missed the point. I didn’t do this completely right. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a home run in the right hands.

Why computational thinking matters – Part I

My presentation at 21CLHK yesterday was an attempt to summarize much of the exploration I’ve done over the past year in my classroom into the connection between learning mathematical concepts and programming. I see a lot of potential there, but the details about how to integrate it effectively and naturally still need to be fleshed out.

After the presentation, I felt there needed to be some way to keep the content active other than just posting the slides. I’ve decided to take some of the main pieces of the presentation and package them as videos describing my thinking. I’m seeing this as an iterative process – in all likelihood, these videos will change as I refine my understanding of what I understand about the situation. Here is the start of what will hopefully be a developing collection:

[wpvideo HOucYa4m]

[wpvideo L3jr2hor]

[wpvideo PBc7xzdW]

I want to express my appreciation to Dan Meyer for his time chatting with during the conference about my ideas on making computation a part of the classroom experience. He pushed back against some my assertions and was honest about which arguments made sense and which needed more definition. I think this is a big deal, but the message on the power of computational thinking has to be spot on so it isn’t misunderstood or misused.

With the help of the edu-blogging community, I think we can nail this thing down together. Let’s talk.

Four (not so) easy pieces – 21CLHK Debrief

I have had an amazing time over the last couple of days at the 21st Century Learning conference in Hong Kong. It’s easy for a technology conference to dip into the red zone of using technology for its own sake. The presenters and attendees here though remained really focused on creating meaningful experiences for students through the tools as a fundamental principle, not an afterthought.

I’m tired, but I think it’s important to note down a few important points that I want to remember to put into action when I return to school. These points, likely by design by the organizers, are framed nicely by the keynote speakers and their messages.

Teach students how to manage device anxiety. (Dr. Larry Rosen)

This needs to be done explicitly and modeled by teachers. This will not get better by accident – instead, we must make an effort to show students how to avoid losing focus through deliberate practice.

Help students form identities as producers of media. (Dr. Nichole Pinkard)

Hoping that students will produce excellent work in a context that does not extend beyond the classroom doors is a sure way to expect less from them. We must expect students to define their place in the digital media world through work that they find meaningful.

Connect students to the rest of the world. (Dr. Jennifer Lane)

With all of the expertise available through the internet, there is no excuse for limiting students to finding out information in isolation from people that use that information to do their jobs. I want to find feasible ways to put my students in contact with people that are solving interesting problems and doing real world work.

Share what I find perplexing with students, and help them do the same. (Dan Meyer)

Though it might feel good to say that I want my students to find things that interesting, I need to model this process if I want students to adopt it for themselves. Curating my own list of perplexing ideas and helping students maintain their own list is a perfect way to make this more than a pipe dream.

Here’s to meeting you all again soon. Safe travels!

Telling students not to procrastinate solves the wrong problem.

In seeing my students working to prepare for semester exams over the last week, I have spent some time thinking about the advice I give students about how to manage the stress associated with this time of year. The reality for them (and for me, for that matter) is that there is a lot going on right now. A quick rundown of my obligations: exams have to be written, assessments marked, comments graded, recommendations written, assignments double-checked for accuracy in the grade-book…this doesn’t even mention the non-school related tasks on my plate. Some tasks I spread out over a few days usually in order to avoid the non-linear way that unpleasantness increases as a deadline approaches. Some tasks have to be done last minute, and there’s no way around them.

When I see students cramming and working feverishly to get things done, part of me wants to channel the oft repeated (and nonsense) advice that ‘if you had started earlier, you wouldn’t have this problem.’ And then I stop. Grand scheme of things, this is not really helpful. You don’t tell someone that just cut off his finger that doing so was a dumb idea. The important part is managing the situation in a way that balances all of the relevant costs and benefits to maximize the overall outcome. The biggest problems my students have is not (only) that they put things off. It’s that they think they can effectively manage the stress that comes with it by following some common, but misdirected principles. Here are my categories of guiding principles:

Ways students foolhardily trick themselves into doing what they do:

Principle of Work-Equivalence: As long as I am working on something I need to be working on, I am using my time effectively. After all, it all needs to get done, so why not just pick something and work on it?
Principle of Longevity: I’ve been doing this school thing for long enough – I know this has worked for me in the past, so I’m going to keep doing it. This comes from a major trend that I see with my students at the moment. Even more frightening is that the older they are, the better they think they are at managing things during stressful times. The way I see it, the opposite is true.
Principle of Education through Suffering: If I am not suffering as I get things done, I am not working hard enough. Carrying around stacks of papers, losing sleep, having unproductive (but fun) study parties seems to be par for the course. It certainly isn’t something that disappears after high school graduation.
Principle of Poor Prioritization: I know what I really should be spending my time doing, but this other mindless task seems like a much better use of my time. This is not about online distractions, though that is a big factor for all of us. This is when a student decides to white out all of the mistakes in his/her notebook from throughout the semester because he or she thinks this will make studying easier. Rewriting notes can be a useful exercise if it involves some sort of processing/summarizing/grouping of ideas. Simply copying them over is a passive activity that feels like it should help, but probably is less productive than other tasks.
Principle of Confidence: I’m going to work on the things I am already good at doing to boost my confidence. This will better make me able to tackle the things I don’t understand. I’ve had conversations with students that do know what they need to work on, but avoid those things like the plague because learning new things is difficult. Revisiting strengths is occasionally a good idea, but again, it is not truly productive.

Figuring out how to shake students of following these guidelines is really what we need to work on. We need to not just just lecture them about getting organized, planning out stressful times, taking effective breaks, and being deliberate about all of these processes, but model how to do these things. My question is one of practicality though – what are the best ways to do this? Is the best way integrated as part of existing courses? (My gut says yes.) Is it about going back to pencil and paper planners? Is it about using technology to help with reminders, calendars, etc?

The thing that I find most difficult about discussing this is that it always turns into a conversation about avoiding procrastination. I agree that this would help…if our students weren’t already told this hundreds of times per year. The design problem that needs to be solved is: given that our students are stressed, how do we help them work through it? Furthermore, how do we make the most of our own experience as adults working through stress, but deliver that experience in a way that doesn’t start by telling students what they believe is wrong?

A tale of two gradebooks – my SBG journey continues

I realized this morning that I could look back at the assignments from my PowerSchool gradebook from a year ago and see the distribution of assignments I had by the end of the semester:

My grades were category based – 5% class-work, 10% homework completion, 10% portfolio, 60% unit tests, and 15% quizzes. This comprised 80% of the semester grade, and was the grade that students saw for the majority of the semester. A semester exam at the end made up the remaining 20%.

While I did enter some information about the homework assignments, my grade was just a reflection of how they completed it relative to the effort I expected them to make while working on it. No penalty for being wrong on problems, but a cumulative penalty developed over time for students tending not to turn it in. This, however, was essentially a behavior grade, and not an indication of what they were actually learning. The homework was the most frequent way for students to get feedback, and it did help students improve in what they were learning, but the completion grade was definitely not a measure of what they were learning at all. There were six quizzes that fit into my reassessment system. Not important enough to matter, I realize now with 20/20 hindsight.

The entire Standards-based-grading community shoots me a look saying ‘we told you so’, but only momentarily and without even a hint of snark. They know I am on their side now.

Here is a screen shot of the assignments in my grade-book as of this morning:

There is a clear indication of what my students have been working on here. With the exception of the portfolio, a student can look at this (and the descriptions I’ve included for each standard) and have a pretty good idea of what they did and didn’t understand over the course of the semester. They know what they should be working on before the semester exam next week. The parents can get a pretty good idea of what they are looking at as well. I knew making the change to standards based grading (SBG) made sense, but there have been so many additional reasons I am happy to have made the change that I really don’t want to go back to the old system.

I’ll do more of a post-game analysis of my SBG implementation in PowerSchool soon. I will be making changes and enhancing parts that I like about what I have done so far. I have to first make it through the busy time ahead of marking exams, submitting comments, and getting my life ready for the extended winter break that is peeking its beautiful head over the piles of reassessments on my desk. It is really satisfying to see that my students have weathered the transition to SBG beautifully. Their grades really do emphasize the positive aspects of learning that a pure assignments & points system blurs without thinking twice.

Crowdsourcing a learning-to-teach framework

After a good conversation with a friend that is getting started with teaching, I was thinking a bit about the process of learning to teach. Things that I obsessed about as a first year teacher come much more naturally now, but if you asked me what I needed to learn in the beginning, I would have babbled on like an idiot. Knowing what to focus on when everything is so new, not to mention feeling you aren’t good at any of it, you understand why it is so easy for students to shut down when we ask them to ‘be responsible’ without helping them understand what we mean. Our job as teachers is to provide students with a framework that will help them be successful in learning what we teach them.

You would hope that guidance in this would be an essential component of teacher preparation programs, but it often doesn’t, particularly in cases where observation is a box to be checked, not a pathway to improvement. There are many frameworks for observation, but I haven’t seen one that specifically gives guidance (or even a curriculum?) for what new teachers should be looking for when in a mentor teacher’s classroom. Most of the observation forms I’ve seen are in evaluating teachers for teacher quality. When I go to watch a colleague, I’m thinking about how I’m going to use what I see to improve what I do, not how to make them a better teacher. I know what I am looking for because I’ve had the keys to my classroom for a little while.

C’mon internet, let’s work together to create this and help our newbies. We were all new to this once, and there’s a lot that we may not realize we are thinking about after pulling out our hair and having teaching nightmares for so long. (Do they ever stop?)

To be clear, the goal is to start conversations between new teachers and their mentors, not put new teachers in a position to evaluate those who are being observed. We want to make the most of this time that is probably the most valuable teacher preparation tool outside of standing in front of a class yourself.

I’ve put a document designed to compile these ideas here:

So you’re a new teacher. What should you focus on this week?

Please add to the list and snarky-up the title. There may even be a better way to organize this so that it isn’t a big list that again serves only to intimidate. Maybe along the lines of Emergency Compliments?

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