Monthly Archives: January 2016

My Favourite – Getting Students Talking to Each Other about Math #MTBoS Week 2

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

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MyFav

So “my favourite” in my math classes is really quite general: student-to-student conversation. This does not entail formal math talks per se, but activities or investigations in which we engage that naturally encourage, or even necessitate, students working together and discussing the concepts or strategies.

A lesson where I talk too much is usually a boring lesson. Even though I put on a show and extol the wonders of math and get overly excited when introducing a new topic, when I’m spending the majority of the period “on the stage”, it is somehow not as energizing as when students actively engage in an activity and take the lead. In addition, in a me-focused period I don’t get the chance to collect as much assessment data or to give as much feedback to students, so I’m often not as certain about how much learning has actually occurred.

When I step into the background and circulate in the room, listening and observing, questioning and probing, I can directly see the learning, I can record observational and conversational data, and I can provide direct feedback during the process rather than a few days later. Here are two general examples of things I do to encourage these student-to-student math conversations:

1. Daily Warm-Ups

Each day I have a warm-up exercise on the screen when students enter the room. Inspiration for this comes from Mary Bourassa who has blogged about her warmup regime here. I do something similar, where each student has a “cahier” (exercise book in English…I teach math in French) that stays in the classroom purely for warmups. Some days I do activities like Mary’s such as Estimation 180, Would You Rather, etc., and some days I do a lagging concept. For example, it could be a question based on what we did the previous day, but I like to reach back a bit further sometimes and select something that we looked at two or three days before.

While students are working on the question, I circulate and select a group of students each day. Depending on the question and what they are doing, I sometimes just observe their process, sometimes I listen to their conversation, or I engage them in a conversation by asking questions such as: “How do you know that your answer is correct?”, or “Can you explain your process to me?”. From there I record a level for each student I observed or conversed with for that overall curriculum expectation. At the end of a unit of study, I look through their cahiers at all of their solutions and provide written feedback as well.

2. Group Challenges/Manipulatives

This one really forces the students to interact because they have a common goal to reach with their group. I like giving them something to touch and move around to elicit the conversation. Some examples:

  • for exponent rules, I have matching cards with the original and simplified expressions
  • for solving linear systems by substitution, I have cards that have different steps of the solution that they need to put in order
  • for factoring and expanding, I like to give them algebra tiles to physically create the rectangle
  • for word problems, I give the problems on cards, the unlabelled diagrams on cards, and the solutions on cards, and students need to match the three by completing the solutions

Again, these activities always seem to initiate student-to-student talk, usually within the mathematical processes, as students try to prove to each other that their answer is correct, or explain their thinking, or suggest a process to complete the challenge.

 

So in very general terms, these types of activities are my favourite activities in my math classes. Especially when teaching math in French, getting students to speak about the concepts in the target language is key for both the development of their understanding of the math, and the development of their second language skills.

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One Day at a Time: #MTBoS Week 1 Post

14 Thursday Jan 2016

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adayinthelife

So I’ve chosen today (Thursday) as my day in the life, but I can’t truly say it’s a typical day with some extra after school events. Regardless, I made the commitment and I’m sticking to it!

5:28am My alarm goes off for the first time. I snooze 2-3 times before rising.

5:50am Out of bed. Make and drink my breakfast smoothie while sifting through Twitter and checking email. Get dressed (in the outfit I preselected last night), do my makeup and hair (I have a lot of hair…thick, straight, and past my waist. Hair alone takes 10 minutes on average), get my pre-packed lunch out of the fridge and bundle up. Clean the snow off my car and quickly shovel as some snow has fallen overnight.

7:15am Finally get in my car and leave for school. Usually I leave at 7, but the shovelling delayed me slightly as did deciding in which style to do my hair today.

7:30am Arrive at school. I’m a little later than usual and I’m slightly annoyed because someone has parked in the spot where I usually park. They also haven’t parked straight because of the snow covering the lines. I begrudgingly pull into the next spot.

7:32am Enter the building with my bags and make the climb to the third floor. Unlock the French Immersion department office and drop my things on my desk. I’m always one of the first staff members to arrive. I like the quiet of the building in the morning – it’s somehow different to me than the quiet after school. I also usually take advantage of the photocopiers not having lineups at this hour, but today I had nothing to copy. I instead delved into some marking.

8:20am Start heading down to my first classroom down the hall for my Grade 10 Academic/Applied French Immersion math class. Class begins at 8:40, but I like to be in the room to welcome my students and set up any materials.

8:40am Period 1: National anthem, announcements, and then down to business. Today is a work period and students have multiple choices of task: the first part of their course culminating which involves creating a portfolio of examples to demonstrate the course expectations, a set of word problems from each area of the course to solve, and some exam review questions. I circulate to answer questions, ask questions, and encourage. I’m always on my feet in this class.

9:55am Bell rings. I head back to my department office to drop my bag.

10:03am Period 2: my prep. I head down to Student Services on the first floor. I’ll be staying late tonight for a grade 8 transition event, and administration is buying dinner for those of us participating. I have to place my Pita Pit order. I meet up with my department head down there and we talk to one of the guidance counsellors about the stacked classes in French Immersion and timetabling for next semester based on some staffing changes that are occurring.

10:50am Back up to the third floor to my department office. Now that my mind is on our timetable I start playing with the Excel Document moving courses and rooms around giving us some options based on who we might get to fill some of our open lines. Check Twitter and email.

11:18am Lunch time. My colleagues begin joining me in our department office. We eat and socialize.

12:13pm Period 3: I head down the hall to a different classroom than my math class for my Grade 12 French Immersion Writer’s Craft class. It was another work period with students completing practice questions for their final exam. We also just had some relaxed life chats and told stories to each other about weird nicknames and then just went on some tangents from there. They’re definitely a fun group of students.

1:28pm Bell rings. Normally I would now be rushing to the second floor gym to change for my gym class, but this week I’m in health, so I head towards the health classroom. On my way, I remember that we have been in the library all this week, and I forgot to tell my class yesterday that we’d be in the classroom, so I hurry to the library to collect the students.

1:35pm Period 4: We all arrive in the health classroom for my Grade 11 Co-Ed French Immersion Health and Physical Education class. And you guessed it, we had a work period! Students are completing some research and investigations related to food choices and their effects on different illnesses as well as larger issues related to food and nutrition in our world.

I like “work periods” in that they allow me to engage and connect with individual or small groups of students and get in some good observations of and conversations about what they’re learning.

2:50pm Final bell. Back to my department office on the third floor for a quick email and Twitter check, and then down to the cafeteria on the first floor for a staff meeting.

3:00pm Our monthly staff meeting today begins with Learning Team time. I’m on a team with two other math teachers and an English teacher, and the four of us have been wrapping our heads around Inquiry-Based Learning in our various disciplines. We have some really rich discussions about instruction and assessment and I enjoy the time we have together.

3:45pm The whole staff meeting begins with agenda items related to a school fundraiser for Syrian refugees, the upcoming Ontario Literacy Test, and our AER committee.

4:30pm Staff meeting wraps up. I linger to discuss triangulation of data in different disciplines with one of the chairs of the AER committee.

5:15pm I head to the staff room on the first floor for the dinner I ordered this morning during my prep. I sit down with my principal and vice-principals, my department head, and some of the guidance counsellors.

6:00pm Grade 8 Course Selection Presentation: Tonight is a presentation run by our Student Services Department for grade 8 students and their families who will be coming to our school next year. We outline graduation requirements, course codes, course offerings in grade 9, and the process for selecting courses. I’m there as a representative of French Immersion as that is the largest program at our school. Following the main presentation, my department head and I give a brief overview of Immersion certificate requirements as well as the courses we offer, and then we field questions from a pretty packed auditorium. I address hesitation about pursuing math in French as in general, I find the students benefit more if they take more courses in French.

7:30pm I climb the stairs back up to the third floor one more time to collect my bags and coat from my department office. The school is quiet again as it was 12 hours ago when I arrived.

7:45pm I arrive home and check my work email. I reply to messages from two of my math students who need help with their culminating portfolios. I have a quick snack and sit down to blog.

9:30pm Time to prepare for tomorrow. I pack my lunch, pick tomorrow’s outfit, set my school bags by the door, and set out my ingredients for tomorrow morning’s smoothie.

10:30pm (hopefully!) Bedtime, and dreams of beautiful math equations.

 

Staying Inside the Lines: Reflections on Learning from my Adult Colouring Book

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

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I have never been very good at art. Dramatic Arts yes, music definitely, but visual arts were never my cup of tea. Despite this, I asked for and received an adult colouring book for Christmas, and I must admit that I’ve become slightly obsessed with it. I have spent so many hours flipping through the pages, trying to select which one to colour, then agonizing over which colours to choose, then engaging in the slow and meticulous process of filling in the design. And although colouring is not visual arts per se, my somewhat meditative hours spent in the book have brought me to reflect on my very first statement and the nature of learning.

Reflection 1: On the Messiness and Scariness of True Learning

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I began this post stating that I’m not good at art. Most of that is my own fault. As a child and a teenager, if I wasn’t good at something right away, I stopped pursuing it. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately?), at the risk of sounding braggy, I had a natural aptitude for enough things that I had the luxury of avoiding those areas where I struggled.

I have always said that I love to learn; as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult, I have never strayed from the desire to discover new knowledge and skills (I mean, look at the title of this blog!). But reflecting now, the learning that I loved as a student was the easy, neat kind: the kind where the next piece of knowledge followed logically from the previous and fit perfectly into my cognitive construct, where the next part of the skill flowed perfectly and built directly upon the foundation I already had. When learning was too challenging or messy, I ran for the hills. Again, at the risk of sounding braggy, I was a gifted identified student and considered by my peers and teachers as one of the top students in my grade, but my mindset was so narrow and fixed. So many of our students, especially those who are gifted or who usually pick up on new concepts quickly, do respond as I used to and avoid the struggle.

It wasn’t until my math courses in university that I encountered a situation where I couldn’t avoid the struggle anymore. This was the first time that I found math to be truly difficult, and I couldn’t just pick another course as math was my chosen minor. I had to engage in some productive struggle and stretch myself in order to understand, but in the end, some of that learning was so much more satisfying than any of the learning I had done before. Again, even though colouring is not me creating a visual arts piece from scratch, I’m considering it my first small step toward stretching myself in that area and truly learning some new skills.

Reflection 2: On Perfectionism

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Every time I have gone outside the lines on my drawing so far I have cringed. The patterns are so intricate that sometimes a small error is unavoidable. But when I zoom out and look at the whole image, those little imperfections fade away, and all I see are the beautiful colours and patterns.

As a teenager, you guessed it, I was a pretty hardcore perfectionist. Those tendencies still rear their ugly head from time to time now in my adult life, but as an educator my mindset really has changed. It was always so important to me to pour hours and hours into each project and task, to script and time oral presentations exactly to the teacher’s specifications, to check and double check and triple check math questions – all with the mindset that the final product was final, the endpoint, and there would be nothing more to take from it once it was completed and submitted.

Now I know, and try my very best to demonstrate to students, that there is still learning to be had and that perfection is not the ultimate, nor really an attainable goal. Instead the focus should be on continuously learning and improving, reflecting on those products that were thought to be final. In French classes, so many students are afraid to speak in discussions because they don’t want to make a mistake (totally the teenage me). As a teacher, I always call attention to my own oral production. As a bilingual person and a teacher of the language, I still make the occasional grammar mistake when writing or speaking, or can’t find the word I want to say and need to talk around it or use a more basic word. Obviously my students (and myself) are working toward more grammatical precision, but at the end of the day, if their message is clear despite some mistakes, then the goal of the communication has been accomplished – just like when I zoom out of my coloured image and my scribbles outside the lines become less and less evident. As long as we are improving each time we engage in a task: whether that task is a math problem, engaging in a second language conversation, or colouring, then perfection ceases to be the be-all and end-all goal. Learning instead takes its place in the forefront.

Funny the thoughts a simple colouring book can provoke.

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