Thanks everyone for coming! Here are the slides and a link to the google doc.
Below is the google doc full of your ideas that we only temporarily destoryed:
#NCTM Regionals Social Justice Ideas for Math Class
Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 18)
Today I am about to get started on my Thinking Classroom experiment. I’m probably more nervous than I should be, so writing this will help. This post is to both organize my thoughts, and serve as a nice opening to a series of posts that I’ll write as this experiment unfolds. Today I am going to talk about what I’m going to try, but first I’ll recap how exactly this experiment came to be in the first place.
How this came to be
I was at the NCTM Regional in Kansas City, heading to an early morning shift at the #MTBOS booth, when the security guard informed me that the vendor area was closed. Naturally, I checked twitter, and saw a few tweets coming from a Peter Liljedahl session, so I headed over there to catch a little bit of the end. I proceeded to have my mind blown. Turns out the Thinking Classroom had dozens of great ideas behind it, and not just by the VNPS stuff:
@pgliljedahl Problem solving is what you do when you don’t know what to do. If you know what to do it’s exercising. A good problem is a problem where there is thinking left to do. #NCTMRegionals
— Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter) November 3, 2018
@pgliljedahl When classes are too organized kids don’t really engage in thinking. Kids placed in a box keep their thinking in a box.
What's the least amount of chaos you can add?. Defront the room. Have no discernable front and face kids in all sorts of different #NCTMRegionals— Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter) November 3, 2018
@pgliljedahl With notes 63% don’t keep up or don’t do it, 90 percent don’t use it later. Students don't know why they are doing it. Tell them
Write letter to your future, dumber, self about what you learned.
Kids will need help structuring this. #NCTMRegionals
— Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter) November 3, 2018
Having a classroom built around thinking was my plan for years! 3 years ago, I stopped calling my classes algebra and started calling them Mathematical Thinking, to signal that this is going to be a different experience. Liljedahl’s research laid out a 10 point plan for making the class into the experience that I hoped to create, with research and charts to back it all up. The biggest headline of the 10 point plan was the Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces, which I had piloted last year. The session gave me some ideas about notes, assessment, and how the teacher provides more problems for the students as the class progresses.
After the talk, I headed back to the booth and talked with Joel Bezaire who had also done some Thinking Classroom stuff in his school. He made it seem really realistic. He told me about Dry Erase Contact Paper, the kinds of problems he uses, the spreadsheet that randomizes kids, and some of the blog posts he used. He also helped me think of ways to make it work at my school, which is not traditional and I don’t have as much time with my kids who all have really different abilities. In another stroke of luck, Peter Liljedahl was doing a session around the corner at the infinity bar after I finished talking to Joel. He was super nice and answered my questions until well over his allotted time. I also was able to download a lot Dylan Kane’s Blog Posts about the thinking classroom before my plane home took to read on the flight home. The fact that all these stars aligned made it clear that the universe wanted me to try the thinking classroom this cycle.
Fast forward to this morning. Things seem pretty much set. First off I have students! 11 students signed up for my class for this cycle, and a few more will trickle in which is good. This means getting kids into groups won’t be too hard, and I can save some of the whiteboard paper I would have used for a class of 30. As each kid signed up I showed them this video from Alex Overwijk, and explained some big ideas. “We’re going to do group work, and we’re not doing a whole bunch of worksheets. Instead, we’re going to maximize how much time you spend in class thinking…” Once class actually starts, I’ll need to reiterate the main ethos of what the class is, while also getting them immediately working. In the past I usually started class with a speech about me, my syllabus and how great our time together will be, but this is always boring and dry. Instead I’m going to explain a little bit about what we are doing, use the randomizer, and then get into some visual patterns and some function notation.
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Update: I taught the first class and it was pretty interesting. The class was small in number with 4 kids of 11 kids (there was really bad weather last night, so it’s possible that people couldn’t make it in). The small class size could have been a good thing since it lowered the chances for a wide scale revolt. I made this randomizer that is basically the one Joel Bezaire described, with some modifications for my small class size, unpredictable attendance. The scary thing that comes along with small class size is the lack of different kinds of thinking. What if the small groups only come up with a couple of answers? Today the class all went through the visual patterns and came up with a few different ways to solve it. In the future, it will be hard to ensure that all of the different kinds of thinking that need to be elicited will actually show up. Maybe I’ll have to write up imaginary group work and post it somewhere else in the room as a “shadow group.”
The math wasn’t that substantial today, but we did plow through it. All the kids say they liked it and thought it was a fun. I am not clear on how we will introduce precise mathematical vocabulary and notation. Function notation will be the first thing we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can just roll it out!
For the past 3 cycles I’ve tried to start my class with a 5 minute Number Sense routine for my class. These have most often been number talks in format. I have come up with a few number talks trying to get at mathematical ideas that I think are worth reviewing with my kids. They have been somewhat successful, some kids really get into it, others roll their eyes, but on the whole it has been pretty positive.
The idea behind the number talks was to give the kids some way to build confidence around concepts with number, operations and proportional reasoning each day. The talks themselves are the little powerpoint openers that I put on the screen and go through each day. Here is an example (and a folder with a bunch of them):
Before the routine each day I remind kids that the talks are about thinking building up the kind of number sense they will need in order to be successful in school and in regular life. We use the “thumb” method to indicate that they have thought of something, and once the thumbs have all come up I’ll showcase individual ways that students thought about the problem. I’m trying to get better at not injecting my strategies because it has turned into a “Carl on stage” routine a few times by mistake. Then we go on to the next problem and during the awkward moment while we wait for thumbs to come up we end up, I’ll point to some of the strategies that other people have used to solve the earlier problems.
I’m keeping with them despite some struggles. A few students don’t seem to engage and almost seem like they are waiting me out. Waiting longer eats into the lesson, and talking to those students or looking at those students seem to kill the class culture, so I worry about that. One idea may be to have some kind of number talks related to the topic at hand, in addition to being about earlier math topics. That might help validate the activity for students.
#MTBoSBlogaust? Let’s DO this!
Why? A bunch of reasons, but we can start with 3. Be more vulneraable, be more honest, and be less perfect.
#1 Get in the arena. The “arena” metaphor comes from Theodore Roosevelt’s Man In The Arena speech, which I recently read in Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. My take away from that book is that people who want to do great things, and who want to be leaders, must to make themselves vulnerable. After my 3rd year of being an administrator I began to feel like I am becoming a leader in name only, so I need to get used to being more vulnerable. In so doing, I will also be helping to build a culture of vulnerability which was highlighted in another book The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyne. What that means is putting ideas out there that are not fully formed, that need to get figured out, and maybe a little risky. I’ll seek out feedback, and not hide from it. I’ll make mistakes and move past it. None of these benefits will happen if I avoid vulnerability and stay on Reddit or youtube or whatever
#2 Get this blog in order. I’m not just talking about brushing off my wordpress skills and adding a new theme or some other fanciness. After giving a talk at TMC urging people to #PushSend, I tried to make a concerted effort to blog more, and ended up blogging less. Why? Aside from having a new baby to feed, bathe, and play with, there was some confusion. See, I have a job of being an assistant principal, but this is a blog about teaching and learning. I only teach 3 or maybe 2 or maybe 0 days a week, and I don’t have nearly as much time to do exciting stuff in the math world. Or maybe I might, but those ideas aren’t as polished as my previous ideas tested against a full teaching load, more on that later. The other question is where do I write about my assistant principal stuff? All these things that I am actively working on in the AP world end up with no real home because I don’t think they should fit on this blog. Or at least that was the case in the past. For this month I’ll try to be honest about what I’m trying to do to grow proessionally. That means I’ll put everything on here, including my spreadsheets and my staff meeting plans, and then decide later if I want to keep doing this or make some kind of admin blog.
#3 Stop with all the perfectionism. #PushSend was very a pep talk for fringe members of the #MTBoS, but really, it was to be a kick in my own butt. I get freaked out whenever I have to click the big blue button, even though I know the benefits as well as anyone. The problem is that a reasoned, data-supported argument about pushing the button does little to sway the part of the brain in charge of the second guessing and the avoidance. The amygdala, a brain structure that represents the evolutionary state of maybe a lizard or a chicken, can takeover when things are scary and shutting off the process of higher functioning parts of the brain. This always leads me to double and triple check my posts before I send them out, or to doubt and re-write things, only to leave the post in ‘Drafts’. My amygdala is confusing the the blue button with an oncoming predator, and triggering me with the fight, flight, or freeze response. By pre-committing to post every day, I will hopefully interrupt that response, as now the stress comes from NOT posting. I am also going to shut down the idea that everything I write will be perfect, because I know nothing will get posted that way.
After a morning flash of insight, I spent way too much time on this Linear Regression Desmos Activity. It seemed like too cool of an idea to not do, although I’m sure it could be better. be For 4 weeks I’ve followed the IM 8th grade unit on data associations with my Algebra class, but I didn’t really have a cool way to talk about what linear regression is, or have a way to teach the kids how to use the regression features in Desmos. In retrospect, I could have sailed into the #MTBoS and found what other people are doing around regression, but I sort of burned my boats when I started making this thing. I trudged on in making this thing until 8 minutes before class, when I realized I needed make copies, and get upstairs. In all the work on the activity and the copies I didn’t get a chance to get the laptop key. We couldn’t use computers!
So I was up in the front of class, trying to keep my kids engaged while Jayla went to find the teacher who last had the laptop key (he was in the bathroom). “Alright guys, let’s review what we’ve been doing the last few days.” Doing a little mini-lesson at the board seemed like a good way to kill time. “How many people know what kind association this might be?” I said to the class while gesturing towards a hastily drawn scatterplot. Students looked back at me with silence and agony. It was clear they were not engaged, maybe because they knew the computers were coming. Their body language screamed that they were not invested in doing any part of this whole lecture thing. Then I thought to myself, “Teaching like this SUCKS.”
Over the past cycle I have been working on teaching with IM. Those materials have a lot more interaction, and realy prioritize the student voice. Kids were getting used to debating about which terms should be used, and agreeing on what is the right answer. There was a smooth flow to those classes while this little mini-lesson felt spreading the last of the natural peanut butter jar. The previous cycle I worked with a co-teacher who really pushed me to have more interactive lessons, with videos for the lectures, so I really haven’t done any kind of lecturing in a while. It really blows.
It set an awful tone for the Desmos Activity, which required a little bit of me in the driver seat since the activity was unclear in some parts. After the Desmos I had the last few lessons from the IM unit. The kids did a card sort, and used the card sort to learn about frequency tables and made some stacked bar charts. Everything felt kind of normal again.
Well kinda… I still need to fix that Desmos Activity, let me know if you have any feedback!