Month: February 2022

The Right Tool For The Job

I had an opportunity this week to sit in on a panel for a statewide discussion for Digital Learning Day. The Indiana DOE’s Digital Learning team has been churning out some outstanding content for teachers and leaders, so I jumped at the chance.

It was a powerhouse panel:

  • Melanie Hackett, dynamic assistant principal at Navarre Middle School in South Bend and an instructor at Indiana University-South Bend
  • Tiffany Reyes, a brilliant former first grade teacher at Potter Spanish Immersion Academy in Indianapolis, now in a doctoral program at University of Illinois
  • Nadine Gilkison, the tech integration director for Franklin Township schools and a fantastic follow on Twitter
  • And some guy from the Region

I was trying to take some notes while keeping up with the conversation, which turned out to be kind of unsustainable. But I did manage to write down two of the most important takeaways:

  • Hackett: “You learn how to win by losing.” She wants teachers on her staff to be risk-takers, to try new things, to be unafraid to fail. And to learn. All the panelists shared their best (or worst, depending on your approach I guess) tech fails in the classroom. We’ve all got one we’d like to forget, right?
  • Reyes: “The time for thinking about the tech is as we plan, not after we plan.” In other words, as I write each activity for our class period, I should be thinking about what is the best tool for the job. Then planning activities with that in mind, rather than laying tech over the top of the completed plan.

In my class, that looks like deciding among a set of GSlides, Quizizz slides, or a Desmos activity for delivering notes. Is my independent practice in Desmos, MathXL, or on paper? Which of those tools does what I need to help my kids understand our topic for the day? Which of those tools makes it possible for me to gauge the level of understanding in real time? Which one plays best with math symbols? Do my kids need to be able to mark up a diagram with congruence symbols?

It feels like sometime about five years ago teachers who had been infusing tech into their lessons could feel a shift, especially those who are connected online. It seems like we went from “Oooh, new shiny! Look at this cool tool!” to “OK, how does this tool serve teaching and learning in my classroom”. Once I started viewing planning through that lens, the decision on which tech became a bit clearer.

Including the decision whether to use tech at all. There are some very cool three-act math shells in Desmos, including one for the In-N-Out Burger 100×100 activity. But even so there are times when pencil & paper is the highest tech I need.

We had back-to-back snow days on Thursday & Friday of Presidents Day weekend, leaving me with an “extra” grey day this week. We’re close to starting the similarity unit in geometry, so I was looking for a proportions-related activity for the day. I toyed with the Barbie Proportions lab, but I would have had to ask around for rulers and yardsticks. Mr. Weatherman wouldn’t cooperate with any sort of outdoor indirect measurement lab, and again, no measuring tools.

Time to resurrect a classic from back in the day: Capture-Recapture with goldfish crackers. I couldn’t find the materials from the last time I did it back in the Gavit days, but fortunately Julie Reulbach wrote about her experiences with the lab and included all her materials (including this video). Let’s go. I’m in. Made a Walmart run, bought about 4000 goldfish crackers, some paper lunch bags, and little Dixie bathroom cups, spent a couple hours prepping everything the night before.

I was super-happy with how the day went. Kids were engaged (mostly), shared the workload appropriately, found out that estimating populations is kind of an inexact science, did math, snacked on unused goldfish.

And: it was a much-needed refresher on writing and solving proportions. We’re coming up quick on the two-year anniversary of The Shutdown.

My co-teacher turned to me as the bell rang to end our final class that Friday and said, “Well, see you in August.” I still haven’t torn the rest of the pages off that calendar.

And it’s apparent that kids have different levels of recall for some key skills in algebra after five quarters of mostly remote learning. But I feel confident we will be ready to hit the ground running when we start triangle similarity at the end of the week.

Count it as sort of ironic that I rolled out a low-tech, pencil-paper activity two days after being on a statewide call talking digital learning. But this day it was definitely the best tool to serve teaching and learning.

What’s The Diff?

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I worked at a school a few years ago that was in the midst of de-tracking its math classes. One of the side effects of that move is that an edu-buzzword became a required practice. One of my super-veteran, super-wise colleagues pointed out that we would need a renewed emphasis on differentiated instruction.

Differentiation/student choice was definitely a “flavor of the month” in the years leading up to Covidtide. Hell, you could build a whole professional development day around it. And as schools gradually return to pseudo-normalcy, folks are starting to pick up where they left off, figuring out which Before Times best practices we can start to re-integrate into our classrooms.

My first exposure to differentiation was maybe 12-15 years ago when I and several of my teacher friends, along with our admin team attended a workshop by Carolyn Coil.

Her theories made perfect sense but I’ll admit it was a little overwhelming. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to differentiate for all the student needs in my classroom. It eventually became somewhat clearer when I attended another workshop in Indianapolis a couple years later. One of the breakout sessions was led by a pair of teachers who combined their two classes and used a flexible grouping technique they referred to as “Island-Peninsula-Land“. 

Based on a quick formative assessment (walking around and peeking over shoulders, even), the teacher quickly sorts his students into three groups:

The Island group is completely self-sufficient. These are the “just give me the assignment so I can get it over with” students. They don’t need my help, so they can go off and do their thing.

The Peninsula group can mostly do the work, but might need a boost from time to time. They can send an envoy to the Island group to ask for help with a specific question.

The Land group does not know how or where to start. They need the most help, so I sit with that group for the session.

Yes, I just quoted myself. Sorry.

They made it crystal-clear what “differentiation” meant and I implemented their techniques in my math class, with very positive results.

At about the same time my school and district went all-in on the Rigor & Relevance Framework. We were encouraged to build lessons targeted towards Bill Daggett’s Adaptation quadrant – students solving complex, real-world problems. Which sounds like an ideal goal. Teachers from my district met to collaborate and develop Gold Seal Lessons. And then within a year we dropped it like a bad habit.

But it made a comeback with a couple of teachers in my building (shoutout to Mama C & Kate!) who led the way with differentiation by using a tic-tac-toe board for student choice in their history classes.

Fast-forward a few years and a change of school & district, and back, and “differentiation” is still a buzzword. Part of the evaluation rubric in fact.  Island-Peninsula-Land kind of extinguished itself a few years ago when I didn’t have an “Island” group in my classes. My classroom doesn’t look very “differentiated” to an outsider these days.

But our geometry team has been offering quiz re-takes (up to three attempts) all year, as well as building in catch-up days (known as “Amnesty Day” in my classroom) and as part of the agenda for the day I’ve been writing an extra credit opportunity. High school kids gravitate to extra credit like grizzly bears to salmon, and hey, why not use that to my advantage?

First quarter I had my students determine the volume of the largest cylinder that would fit inside my classroom. Next thing you know there are kids up and out of their seats, measuring and calculating and asking questions. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t feel like “extra” credit to me. Just a different way of showing what they know. Thus, “differentiation”.

But I did take things a bit farther for the Amnesty Day scheduled for last week but pushed back by a pair of snow days that created a five-day weekend. Stealing an idea that’s been floating around in my circles for a while, I made a playlist of extra credit options. Here’s the options:

  • “The Blind Men and the Quadrilateral” -short story writing in the style of “The Blind men And The Elephant” fable
  • Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre reflection – borrowed from our Black Student Union faculty sponsor
  • Quadrilaterals social media profile – inspired by this blog post, using fake SM profiles gleaned from Matt Miller and others
  • Design a zipline – a snippet of the Barbie Zipline activity, since we used Phythagorean Theorem when working with rhombi and squares

Students can attempt one, two, three, all four, or zero of the options during classtime. I know, that’s potentially a lot of extra credit points. Some might even say “unfair”. I’ll take a moment to recall the words of a very wise district-level administrator who once asked a math department meeting, “Why do you want to make it harder for kids to get a credit in your class?”

  • Is there a risk that students who completely blew off the classwork & quizzes up to now can turn their grade around in a day? Sure.
  • Will some of those students try to cheat their way through the playlist assignments? Duh. (Have you met high school kids?).
  • Will some kids who already have a 100% average take the day off because they don’t need the points? Uh-huh.
  • Will some of the kids who have an A+ do all four and try to break Power School with like a 125% average for the nine-weeks? I’m kind of counting on it. (Again, have you met high school kids?)
  • Am I supposed to be mad when kids want to do more math in my class? That question answers itself.

But what I’m also counting on is some kids who aren’t engaged with our day-to-day activities will be drawn to at least one of the options because it suits their personality and skills and interests and show me they kind of get what we’ve been talking about in class and it feels a little bit like isn’t that what a grade is for?

Wait. Am I differentiating differentiation?

Source

Also, I’m apparently now taking teaching cues from Billy Donovan:

If my kids are gonna work to try to get better, I’m here for it.

Adventures in #EduProtocols – Club Sandwich, Hold The Mayo

“I tried everything in my life

Things I like I try ’em twice”

Lynyrd Skynyrd, “You Got That Right”

Yes, I’m totally that guy who finds a cool thing and does it to death. Alternatively, I’m that teacher who limits himself and his students to a manageable number of tools/sites/activities that advance teaching and learning, rotating enough to keep them from wearing out but using them often enough so kids get the routine down.

That’s part of the beauty of EduProtocols – they are designed as a shell that teachers dump content into. Any subject, any topic. Let’s go.

Plus, you get enough smart creative teachers together they start making magic happen. The creators of EduProtocols, Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern, have been boosting teachers who have been stacking or smashing the tools together, making something new and fabulous.

And it seemed like time to take a dive.

This week’s highlight was not really an intentional smashing effort in my case, more like “making nachos” to use Corippo’s analogy.

Twitter typos suck. “Fast and the Curious”, obviously. Also: the video interview closed when Ditch Summit ended, but a quick Google search will find you a helpful Corippo interview.

We did Iron Chef last week on parallelograms, but I switched up the template to make each page a Frayer on one specific shape (borrowed the Frayer layout from Alice Keeler) then tacked on two Venn diagram slides (from the PresentationGO site) at the end.

Working in groups of (ideally) four, each student Frayered one type of parallelogram on one slide, then teamed up with another student to contrast and compare (the big-money payout of Cyber Sandwich) their two shapes in a Venn diagram on a separate slide.

So if you are scoring at home, that’s Iron Chef x Frayer x Cyber Sandwich. Call it a “Club Sandwich” if you want. Somebody else way smarter than me probably already has.

Source (used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) )

Like I said, I didn’t start out with stacking in mind, or trying to come up with a fun name. I wanted to have a way for my students to take a minute to process and organize what they had learned about the types of parallelograms, and especially to take some time to think about how they are similar and how they are different. Plus, working with other actual humans. We are under a mask mandate in my district and although I’m not sure how strictly spacing is enforced I’m still not super comfortable podding up my kids like we used to do in the Before Times so we do a lot less group work than we used to.

So really this was a case of designing an activity using familiar tools that supported my learning goals for the day working within safety constraints (or best practices to put a more positive spin on it). It’s a pretty cool place to be.

Speaking of cool:

They did some good work. A lot of my students customized their photo selection (as above, the football field or the Stone Container Building or the puppy) which was very cool. I love seeing their personalities pop in different ways when we do activities in class.

It did take about 50% longer than I had planned for, and I needed that last part of class for some pencil/paper practice as well. I probably should have set a timer on the slides portion of the activity.

Also, not every class had a “multiple of four” number of students, so some groups ended up having one person double up on slides. Most were amenable to that mod. I had the rare student who wanted to work alone (who doesn’t sometimes?) but I once I helped them see that would be four times the work for one times the points, they also were willing to jump in to a set of slides with other kids.

Plus any excuse to let their Worktime Playlist run I’ll take.

Added bonus: our PD this week from our instructional coaches was on vocabulary strategies in the classroom and Frayer was one of the tools presented so I felt like I’m on the right track with tools even when I wrap them in wild packaging like one (or more) of the EduProtocols.

Corippo is always using food analogies in his presentations, so he’s speaking my language. In the video above he references this infographic on hot dog styles around the world. I’m a long-time Chicago Dog guy so I’m not opposed to piling on the goodness. On a Vienna Beef, or on a classroom activity.

Adventures in #EduProtocols: Iron Chef x What Do You Meme?

It’s a common practice in my district that rosters get shuffled at the semester. Two of my classes came back to me pretty much intact but the other five had significant turnover. Add in two weeks of winter break, a week of remote due to an Omicron surge in our area then a week of finals and a student four-day weekend, and it had been literally a month since we had a class period that followed our usual agenda. So clearly it was worth taking a day to review expectations and procedures.

Except…

I printed out a new set of course expectations, took a quick glance and thought, “Oh, that’s really not how we do things in here anymore at all.” Leading in to the year I had planned to block out multiple periods of time within our 80-minute class periods for blended learning, and I quickly realized early on that the system I had put together was not meeting my students’ needs. So we are a little more “traditional” in our lesson design these days (sorry about that).

And I didn’t want to tell my students we do it one way when we really do it another. What to do? Well who knows the class better than the kids who have been with me for four months? And who has more cred with kids than other kids? So I hatched a plot. Grabbed an Iron Chef template from the EduProtocols website, made three of the slides for “how we do things” (what’s the daily agenda, what do quizzes look like, how to get a good grade in here) and the fourth slide was a kid-created meme “about the first semester of math”. Could be something funny that happened in class, or an a-ha moment, or just a wry commentary on the subject, the teacher, or school in general. I wanted to have a little fun, but I also wanted new-to-me students or my more creative-minded students to have an outlet.

And off we went.

They did a great job of breaking down the basics, both as an intro for the new kids and as a reminder for themselves, and outdid themselves with the memes. Yeah, some kids just searched for existing memes but the majority built their own.

In the presenter notes for the slide I gave them a link to memegenerator, and suggested they use one of five templates (because old people love dead memes – Shouting Woman vs Cat, Change My Mind, Evil Kermit, All The Things, Surprised Pikachu). But they were free to pick any template and do whatever they wanted with it (school appropriate obvi).

And of course I wanted to honor their efforts so I immortalized a sample into a bulletin board in class.

And yeah, I totally bumped that “Draw 25” over about 4 inches to the left after I took this photo so the large items somewhat resemble the line y=x. Because Math Dork.

Proof that great minds think alike, unbeknownst to me another teacher in the building (a former student of mine!) had her class make memes the week earlier, and got some really fabulous stuff from her kids. I felt like telling my kids they needed to up their game a little bit because Ms. Cruz’s students were killin’ it.

Added bonus fun: one of my colleagues saw me posting about it and texted me asking for a hand getting the meme part of the activity set up for her kids. We had a huge two-day snowstorm this week so had a couple of e-learning days. My youngest and I had tickets for an AEW show in Chicago that night so I ended up answering her questions from the floor of the Wintrust Arena.

It seemed like IDOT basically skipped all the South Side expressways. A white-knuckle ride all the way to the Ryan. Took the Skyway home. Willing to take my chances on a giant elevated bridge instead of navigating that mess again.

Most of us put our e-day assignments into a GForm so I helped her set up her response so students could save their memes to their chromebooks and do a file upload to turn it in. Just doing my part to help, ma’am. Also: Miracles of modern technology, baby.

In this crazy year I’ve not given EduProtocols the workout they have got in past years. I’m seeing an opportunity later this week though. The most recent book in the series (by Lisa Nowakowski and Jeremiah Ruesch) focuses exclusively on using the shells in the math classroom, and the authors offered a different take on Iron Chef. It’s brilliant – taking a math topic that can be split into four slides (such as solving quadratics or systems of equations) and having four students solve the same problem, each using a different method. I’m hoping to use a similar setup for categories of quadrilaterals. A little bit like “Quadratics Three Ways” kicked up for the 21st Century.

And we definitely should do the meme part of the assignment again. Not gonna lie, a little bummed none of them opted for a sweet Evil Kermit math teacher troll.

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