The beauty of teaching is summer’s off right? Nah. I attended a training last week…. Which got my brain already thinking about what I’m going to do in the fall.
The primary focus of this training was around being able to teach College in the Classroom with a local university. The mornings are spent dealing with university items like legal changes, enrollment requirements, placement changes etc. The afternoon is spent with the content leads from the university.
The math people focused on this idea of rigor. Rigor is something that has been discussed a lot in math lately. However, this training went a step above to distinguish rigor as something different than someone who is simply just mathematically fluent. They went so far as to define rigor as a thinking process.
That said – common core standards have been trying to shift thinking around math instruction away from simply generating students who are algorithmically fluent.
I walked away from this training with a few musings in my mind on some things I’d like to try next year.
Musings: How Can I do the following in the fall?
- Project based tasks. The person who presented had the luxury of spending a week or more talking about how to add fractions. He has the luxury of working in a project based school program where students apply and all teachers are trained to teach this way. That all said, while much of the presentation seems so far out of reach in my current situation, I can implement project based learning in some capacities. Do we do a cumulative project per unit? Per topic? Where do I find valuable projects that meet the learning goals of the unit? I’m trying very hard not to brush off this idea. At the same time, it is completely overwhelming.
- Flipping. Ok. I need to spend some time with my curriculums in order to flip my classroom. I really dig this idea that notes are the homework. If I really want to truly increase the rigor in my classroom, I’ll need to be creative. I loved how the people from the university acknowledged that there will always be some form of lecture in a math class. There are just procedures and skills that need to be developed along the way. However, that said, I’ve been reflecting on life as well and here’s where the two overlap: Where we spend our time speaks to our priorities. If we spend all our time in class lecturing, we send the message to students that notes are most important. If we spend our time asking questions, developing routines, and thinking, that’s what becomes valuable. So are notes the most important part of my instruction? Are notes the true evidence of student learning? I don’t think so. That said – taking notes doesn’t require great support. Students can take notes without too much support (after being taught how) and without too much thinking.
- Problem of the week. I did this in my first year of teaching around old WASL problems and I got amazing scores out of my students. The rest of my week was taught very traditionally. I tried doing this with my AP students a couple years ago and with very little success. However, I think what was different was the emphasis and priority. My AP students were assigned lots of routine problems they needed to do outside of class and we lectured in class. These problems of the week were kind of like sprinkles to the sundae. See below.
The base of math class, much like the base of a Sundae, is lecture. Telling the students which processes to use and when. I enter every school year hoping to move past this but about 1/2 way through the first trimester, I revert back to old habits. However, this is also because in the majority of math classes, the most substance to our classes are lecture. Then the drizzle that makes it a sundae is the homework problems. These are the definition of a sundae and also end up as a the definition of math class. Test prep for SBA and ACT are also thrown in there as a big giant dollop of whipped cream because whipped cream is a big extra, it makes it look pretty and elevates your Sundae. Test scores give an illusion that math class was effective for students. Problem solving is then the sprinkles we occasionally top on there. Some teachers have sprinkles and others don’t. Some teachers have more sprinkles than others. At the end of the day though, that’s all it is…. Sprinkles. Last but not least, modeling is the cherry on top of the sundae that just gets treated as that little bit extra for those “good” math students who have proven themselves capable of more than the whipped cream and sprinkles. Even then, I don’t think most teachers are adequately trained to teach modeling. I am afraid, I’m not.
My ultimate questions to myself are this: How do I make the ice cream of my class problem solving with the procedures/fluency as the chocolate sauce? How do I treat lecture as the whipped cream and make modeling the sprinkles? How do I make test prep the cherry on top? I want test prep the cherry because if the foundational skills are there, then the test prep truly becomes prepping students on how to take a test and not on content.
Future Blogs:
What will flipping my classroom look like? What can I use to effectively do this? How will I hold students accountable for note taking? How will I hold myself accountable for recording notes ahead of time? What platform will I use to record the notes? What platform will I use to assign the videos? Do all videos need to be lecture/notes based?
What will bringing back a problem of the week look like? In the past, the buy in on these problems of the week are at the end of the day test prep. However, I don’t want them all to be test prep. I want them to be thinking based. (Now the test prep I did assign when I’ve done this were all problem solving based – not procedure based). How will I provide feedback? How will I remediate? How will I hold students accountable?
How can I change what homework is for my classes? How do I move away from rote practice problems each day. Can I assign a problem set of procedural problems once a week instead? How can I make this homework more meaningful for students? Maybe this procedural practice has no role in homework at all. Much to be said and thought through here.
Ormberg Teaching 