Slow down the teaching to speed up the learning

The title of this post was a line we heard A LOT last year, and at the time we were all thinking, "what is that supposed to mean?!??" I think I get it now. I've recently read Make It Stick, by Peter Brown, followed a Twitter chat about the book, and I'm continuing to read blog posts by other teachers about how they're going to use what the book taught them, and I finally understand what our admin meant by that line.

I use to stress about grading. We had 80 minute classes, to keep middle schoolers focused we (the sixth grade math teachers) broke our class time up into three chunks, add in homework and I could easily have 2 or 3 new assignments to grade each day (because if it wasn't graded, our students wouldn't do it). That's about 400 assignments over the course of a year. It was overwhelming.

I think what our admin meant was for us to do higher level questions, take more time for students to discuss their work and different ways of approaching a problem, explore how a problem might be extended, reflect on their thought processes and work, and revise their work. Instead of spending 25 minutes on 8 basic process problems we should have spent 1 or 2 whole classes working on a handful of deep questions.

Hindsight is 20/20, right? The awesome part about being a teacher is being able to start fresh each August and learn from our past mistakes, so that's what I plan to do :)

Here are some things I want to do:

1. Explicitly teach students how to take notes. I've gone to AVID training, so I can share Cornell Notes with them. I've don't interactive notebooks for a few years, so I can show them that way of being organized and making notes engaging. And I've pinned a few things on teaching students how to take notes. Now I just need to not stress about time and take a day or two (or three) to teach students how to organize and use what they're taught in class.

2. Give students time to reflect. Without time to reflect, how can I expect students to learn from their mistakes, or learn in general? I need to give them time to connect what we're learning to what they already know as well as any real life applications. I don't think they'll be use to this in math class, so I'll need to come up with a list of questions or sentence stems they can use to guide their thinking. One thing that might help with the building connections part would be AVID one-pagers; students get a blank sheet of paper, colored pencils, pens, pencils, etc. and summarize/connect/draw what they learned. Here is an example of a proportions one-pager:

Anna at TypeAMathLand.blogspot.com mentioned having a summary sheet in their notebooks at the end of each unit, and I LOVE the idea. I'm thinking of making the sheet an assignment/homework two days before each test, so students can come to review days (assuming I have time to take a day before each test to review) knowing what topics they need more time working with. 

I saw the idea somewhere (if it was your idea please let me know so I can give you credit!) of letting students grade their own tests using an answer key and a unique colored pen. I'm not sure I want them looking at test answer keys, but I plan to continue doing weekly checks of understanding (read: quizzes, but we didn't call them quizzes) and I think this would be a good time for them to figure out where (and why) they went wrong. This would help them (and me) see instantly what they know and what they need to review more.

3. Give students time to revisit and revise their work. Half the value of feedback is students being able to correct what they got wrong. I'm not sure what type of assignment(s) I want to do this for, but I want to give students a chance to make corrections after getting feedback but before its formally graded. Feedback might come from a peer, a group, or me, but I want to give students a chance to correct misconceptions before I assess their understanding and give it a grade. I know I won't have the time to look at each assignment twice, even if I do some peer checking, so I want to be sure to implement this where it'll have the greatest impact.

4. Continue spiral review activities, and make tests spiral as well. A big point of Make It Stick was mixed review and revisiting a topic days/weeks/months later. The school I was at required we do a spiral review activity each day, so interleaving (as it's called in the book) is something I'm very familiar with, but I think I need to do more than just one activity. I see homeworks being a mixed review, not including any problems on the topic covered that day (again, an idea I can't remember where I got it from; let me know if it's yours), and tests including items from previous units. I think this last part will go well with the standars-based grading hybrid I did last year (and plan to do this year); these old-unit questions will be optional and will be the topics the most students have low grades for. If students choose to attempt these problems they can replace their current grade on the topic. One thing I struggled to decide on last year, and I can use some input on for this year, is whether newer lower grades should replace older higher grades. This past year I always kept the highest grade a student earned on a learning target, assuming that lower grades were a product of having a bad day or making a silly mistake. I figured if a student could earn an A (which was a real challenge) on a learning target at one point they had to have a real understanding of a topic, and any newer lower grades were due to issues besides not understanding.

In summary, I think that spending more time working on, reflecting on, and fixing higher quality questions would allow me to slow down the teaching to speed up the learning. Thanks for reading my brain dump! And thank you Anna for your post that lead to this eureka moment! Any feedback/advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated!

Keep, Change, Start, Stop

Our last day of school was two weeks ago... I can't believe its already been two weeks! I'm trying to be very aware of every day this summer, so at the end I don't feel like I've taken it for granted; for example, if we were still in school right now I'd be in the middle of my second class for the day. I'm also trying to do something five days a week, so I don't feel like I wasted my time.

My big to-do is getting ready for next year. I'm switching from teaching sixth grade to teaching high school. Right now the plan is two Math I courses and one Math II Honors course first semester, and two Math II courses and one Math II Honors second semester. I'm liking the idea that this time next year I will have taught and tweaked Math II Honors twice. I have a friend that teaches science as a semester class in seventh grade, and I'm envious that she gets more opportunities to complete her curriculum and make improvements.

So, without further ado, I'd like to talk about what I want to Keep, Change, Start and Stop...

Keep

• "Interactive" Notebook- I love the organization of us all being on the same page, and knowing exactly where to direction a student when they're struggling (even better, when a student uses it without prompting!). They're not very interactive (I don't do many foldables) but that's something I'll need to work on at some point.
• Class Jobs- I might have to do some modifying of what jobs are available, but I LOVE having the extra help around class. My most used class job was group leaders; group leaders would help me pass out and collect things throughout class. I handed them each (three in each class) a small stack of papers and they passes them out. They also collected papers at the end of class, so I didn't have 27 students trying to turn in their paper in at the same time. Another job that seems minor, but I loved having, was door monitor. They didn't really monitor the door, but whenever we went anywhere (we had to walk as a class everywhere, and I had to escort them) I had one student responsible for closing the door when everyone was out of the room.
• Class Economy- Part of my classroom management was a class store. Students earned points for behaving, doing class jobs, doing extra work, or helping me. Students could redeem this points for supplies and rewards in my class store. I had a link to a pdf of the "prices" for each item on my class website, and I also created a google form they used to submit an order. I think this is one of the reasons my classes ran so smoothly; students loved earning points and were super cooperative.

Change

• Standards Based Grading- I want to keep the idea that grades are reported by learning target, but in a district that's still on a 0-100, A-F scale its a huge stresser trying to grade based on understanding. So I want to continue to break up grades by skill, but each question will be worth two points (one for showing work, one for correct answer) and grades will be calculated normally.
• Notes- This past year my goal was to do cornell notes, and I started out the year doing so, but it faded away. I tried letting up control, and putting more responsibility on the students, but they didn't keep up with it and I didn't enforce it. I'm not sure if I'll do cornell notes again this year, but I have found some awesome pins about explicitly teaching students how to take notes and I am going to do that, in some form.

Start

• Daily reflections of lessons- I found my lesson plans from my first year. Man, were they detailed! AND I reflected on each lesson each day!! I think that stopped when I stopped printing my lessons and didn't have a pretty blank box staring at me everyday. This year I bought a lesson plan book (this past year I used a google spreadsheet); I'm trying hand written lessons and I want to start reflection again each day.
• Teaching high school- This seems like a duh, at this point, but with switching districts, schools, grades, standards, I think one Start is enough.

Stop

• Talking so much- I think I talk too much sometimes and my words are losing their value.
• Grading everything- Ok, I've gotten away from grading EVERYTHING, but I still grade too much. I'm not sure if that's just part of being a math teacher (my ELA, Science and Social Studies friends don't grade nearly as much as I do) or if I'm over doing it. I'll have to find someone (more multiple people) in the math department at my new school with more experience and find out what they do.