Month: September 2023

Go Govs

Morton Governors representing at Viva College! Scholarship Lunch

It’s not just teachers who are stretched thin these days. I got an email last week from one of our school counselors – would I be willing to chaperone a field trip of 10 or so senior students to a scholarship luncheon? The counselors had to be at day-long event downstate and wanted to make sure our kids did not have to miss out on this opportunity.

You got it.

So at 10:45 this morning I was on a bus with 20 seniors from the two high schools in our district, heading to a banquet center in the ‘burbs for the Latinos Count Viva College! Scholarship Lunch.

The counselors did all the background work so it was pretty much plug & play – they emailed me the roster of students and the tickets for the venue, dropped off the signed permission slips and we were good to go.

So, about that permission slip – it mentioned that the students would be provided with a box lunch from our cafeteria. I thought that was a little odd since lunch was included in the program. But like I said, I joined the festivities well past the planning stage. And if the kids were supposed to get lunch and I didn’t follow through, that’s a problem. So I swing by the cafeteria to find out what I can.

You guessed it. They were not aware of any request for lunches. One long look from the cafeteria director, and I’m preparing to be sent on my way empty-handed. No paperwork, no proper channels, the first of our four lunches is going to start in 20 minutes or so, and here comes this fool asking for a bunch of to-go packages.

And then: “How many kids? When do you leave?”

Ten kids. Maybe 15 minutes.

And in the blink of an eye she mobilized her entire staff to assemble the box lunches. Even got me a big cardboard box to carry them in. It was amazing. For those ten minutes this was the only job that mattered to the ladies in the cafeteria, that our students were taken care of.

That’s what it means to be a Morton Governor, right there.

So I come back to the A door, round up my kids and the bus pulls up. It’s one of our accessible busses so it has fewer seats than the traditional design. In fact, it’s two seats short. A couple of us tried to go three-wide across the bench seat, which would be tolerable for the half-hour trip. Just then one of busses dropping kids back at school from the career center pulled up. He discharged his kids, and our driver walked out to meet him. I knew was she was doing as soon as she took the first step. Our driver took it upon herself to trade busses so all our kids would have a seat and travel in safety and comfort. Who does that? The men and women who drive for the School City of Hammond, that’s who.

(Oh BTW she picked the perfect radio station for the trip, too. And flawlessly navigated around several expressway on-ramp closures).

Twice in the span of a half-hour I saw people who interact with our kids every day make split-second decisions all based on making sure our students were taken care of and treated right. It was awesome and inspiring.

Our kids enjoyed a fabulous lunch of chicken piccata, mashed potatoes, and fresh veggies. They met up with friends who live in neighboring cities. The emcee invited the attendees to stand up and group up with people they shared a country of heritage with. Then he called them out one at a time, each to a raucous cheer. “Where’s my Mexicans? Where are the Cubans? How about Puerto Rico? Colombia? Ecuador? Who’s here from the Dominican Republic?”

Everybody in the room felt seen.

But that was just the beginning. The Latinos Count website states the organization’s purpose:

The executive director pointed out that there were officials from several local universities at the event. He challenged the kids in attendance – if you are putting in the work in school, you deserve to have schools fighting over you. He pointed out the Latino president of Valparaiso University and said, “If you have a 4.0, I want you to walk up to José Padilla, shake his hand, look him in the eye, introduce yourself and say ‘I have a 4.0 in school. What will you do for me to get me to go to VU?'”

Bold. But this guy walks his talk. This wasn’t a feel-good event to check off a DEI box.

A lot of people went out of their way to make sure kids were put first today, and helped along the pathway to their tomorrow. Including a bunch that do their job every day outside of the spotlight. They deserve every shoutout that comes their way. So damn proud to be a Governor right now.

You might even be able to talk me into taking some Morton kids on a college trip or two.

Goals

Back in the early days of my quest to learn how to be better at teaching, I stumbled across Shawn Cornally, an ambitious and thoughtful science and math teacher in The Middle Of Nowhere, Iowa. His brilliant blog no longer exists (RIP ThinkThankThunk) but he is best known now as the co-founder of Iowa BIG, a project-based school in Cedar Rapids.

Now that we’re on our own PBL journey in my district, I encountered Cornally’s thinking again on a podcast he produced with BIG co-founder Trace Pickering. One episode the two chopped it up on project-based learning especially as it relates to math and science. It was a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation (one student proposed a project to learn the best way to smoke bacon, and not only designed and fabricated his own smoker, he won a ribbon at the county fair). Cornally closed with the following thought, which was so powerful I want to quote it verbatim:

I’m proud of the experience we’ve given every single student, even the students who don’t succeed, or leave partway through their experience here. I think that we always represent to them a reality where adults respect teenagers, where the community’s problems are the school’s problems, we’ve modeled for students that learning is something you do, not because “when am I gonna use this?” or “exactly how much money will this make me?”, but because it makes you smarter, and it makes you more pliable, and it makes you more useful, in any situation. The question shouldn’t be “when am I ever gonna use this?”, the question should be “am I smart enough to extend this into any part of my life?” That should always be the question you’re asking.

The Iowa BIG Podcast Season 2 Episode 11 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2phrhncf8TcPiu41htKEVY?si=6VtuRCn6TU2GMJ2Og9IVBg

That sounds a lot like the goals we have for our building (in an aging Rust Belt city) in our third year of a consolidation and our third year of a conversion to a project-based learning school.

Trying to duplicate Iowa BIG in our traditional high school setting would be like trying to build a modern-day seating bowl in a historic stadium.

Soldier Field, Chicago. Photo cred: By Sea Cow – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120032773

It might not quite fit.

But our journey can definitely benefit from benchmarking some of the thought processes that went into the Iowa BIG launch.

The founders’ vision came into focus as a result of the Billy Madison Project – more than 60 community members were invited to experience school as students do. What did they learn?

  • Everything kids do in school is fake. Students do work for one person. The teacher. There is no authentic audience who has a reason to care about what they have produced.
  • There are no interactions with people outside of their narrow age band, so students don’t really learn how to work with people older or younger than them.
  • School hasn’t really changed much in 60 years.
  • Every teacher’s class is The Most Important Thing In The World. No one recognizes that the kid who has the lead role in the play that premieres tonight could give a shit about finding the zeros of a polynomial function in Algebra II this morning.
  • The whole point seems to be grade-chasing rather than actual functional learning.

Cornally has pointed out (especially in the STEM fields) that we have designed the curriculum and the standards around the 0.05 percent of people who are going on to be Ph. Ds in math. But then we miss the rest of the students badly.

And they know it.

So what do we do with that?

I’ll note that the idea of community partnerships in the city of Hammond is nothing new. The district’s FIRST Robotics team, Team Hammond 71, is a four-time world champion. That is the natural product of a partnership between industry mentors in the city, and the students of the city of Hammond.

There’s tons of problems that need solving in Hammond, and no shortage of people who can articulate those problems to our kids. Boom. Instant community partners. If we know where to look and who to ask.

And it dovetails beautifully with our district’s vision. We spent our district-wide PD afternoon this week breaking apart the pillars of our Strategic Plan. The stated priorities are:

  • Student success
  • Retain students and staff
  • Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Improved communication at all levels
  • Fiscal responsibility
  • United district community

We know, from district office to the building level, that we need to make our instruction meaningful and equitable for all of our students. We know we need to leverage our community’s assets to better serve our students. We know we need to make school relevant to our students’ lives, to tap their passions to ignite their learning. We know we need to prepare them for “life after Morton”. That’s what project-based learning, properly executed, does.

They are good goals. Compelling goals. And: Our goals for our students are similar to Iowa BIG’s even though we might be approaching them from a slightly different trajectory.

It’s an ongoing process. Three weeks in to my new role as an instructional coach it’s been fascinating to see the movement behind the curtain to make project-based learning a reality in my building. As a teacher I’ve sat in on the PDs from the other side of the table, I’ve shared problem-based learning activities with my PLC. Now I’m in a position to share more widely, and to push the ball forward in this effort.

And for me, it’s comforting to know that there are people out there who have carved out the path we are trying to follow.

One last thing: the new principal at the other high school in my district is a former colleague of my mother-in-law, at a neaby district which has been on the project-based learning journey for a decade.

On a call with our New Tech building coaches this week, she pointed out that her daughter graduated from a New Tech school and all this time later she still raves about the experience. We have cheerleaders for the movement leading our schools. The pieces are in place to make the vision a reality.

“Am I smart enough to extend this into any part of my life?”

I might hang that as a sign over my classroom door.

The T-Shirt Shop

Source

Plenty of things have changed about my day-to-day with my shift to instructional coach in my building, but one constant is my attitude about creating and sharing materials. I’ve been sharing everything I make with my geometry colleagues the last two years, and I’ve continued to push resources out to my fellow algebra II teachers this year.

It might even be more imperative this time around. Our district shifted from an A/B block schedule to a traditional seven-period schedule this year, meaning everyone’s plan time has been cut in half and they’re seeing twice the amount of student work per day. Creating problem-based activities is probably pretty far down the list of priorities. Sound like they could use a partner in that effort.

Source

Someone to set the table.

Julie Reulbach’s linear inequalities discovery lesson has been floating around in my head for a while. Meanwhile, our Algebra II team is beginning the year with Unit 3 (Linear Systems). We recognize the need to support our students with review in graphing and solving equations if we’re gonna jump right in to systems first thing. And we are in Year 3 of an ongoing conversion to a project-based learning school.

Taking all those points into account, my solution was to build a problem-based activity (think Three-Act Math) around Reulbach’s work. Thus “The T-Shirt Shop” was born. (Documents here, here, and here).

The scenario was students reseraching costs for t-shirts and hoodies to be sold as a fundraiser for a student group. In our set-up, a community organzation in Hammond had donated $2000 to cover the costs. My kids dove right in, brainstorming “knows” and “need to knows” and posting them, so that the group could share the collected knowledge. Then it was off to Google “t-shirt printers” and spend some imaginary money.

It was about this time that one of my students (returning to me from geometry last year) asked, “Hey Mr. Dull, this is cool and all, but when are we gonna do real math?”

My two big takeaways:

  • Real Data, chosen well and used well, hooks students in like no textbook or worksheet problem can
  • Real Data is messy, and sometimes that serves as a hurdle to doing the math we’re focusing on in class

Once they had prices in hand, their job was to determine combinations of t-shirts and hoodies that would cost exactly $2000, combinations that would be less than $2000, and combinations that they could not afford because the cost was more than $2000. They recorded these on paper and then entered them to a Desmos graph I had set up in advance and shared to them through Schoology.

And here’s where things kind of went off the rails. The “real math” they were asking for a minute ago? I had to provide plenty of support when it came to writing an equation of their “exactly $2000” line. Which cost us time, and kind of took away some of the power of the reveal when I changed the equals sign to “less than or equals”. And they had trouble articulating the significance of the dots in the shaded region.

Once I helped them see what they were seeing I asked them a series of reflection questions to close out the day, so they could put in words what it meant that the dots were above the line or below the line, and set the table for next time when we’d use this process on paper to solve systems of linear inequalities.

Part of the New Tech model is grading using a rubric of some of the NTN Learning Outcomes. I selected Knowledge and Thinking, and Collaboration. I was looking specifically for them to use multiple representations of the data (table, graph, equation), to understand and express the significance of the points in the shaded region or outside the shaded region, and that they participated in the brainstorming and research.

I’ll count the two days as a partial success as we introduced the problem-based learning model we’ll use throughout the year, and used one of our go-to sites in Desmos to meet the state standard of graphing with technology. I’ll keep building in supports for the “actual math”.

And now that I’ve taken a test drive I’ll keep my eyes out for one of my Algebra II colleagues who might want to roll it out in their class. With my full support, of course.