Weighted Averages

Today was the third day of class, and both my Algebra and Geometry classes finally got around to the dreaded syllabus.  My syllabus is in brochure format this year which seems to make it a little easier to digest for both parents and students.

I absolutely hate just talking at my students. So, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I prefer to not spend the whole class period reading the syllabus to them.  Instead, I created a lesson this year that discusses the two most important pieces of information in my syllabus. My students needed to be introduced to what kind of assignments were going to be expected of them, and how I assign grades to those assignments.

I choose to weight my grades, and this is often the first time my students have been in a class where they are given a weighted grade. This often leads to choruses of "Why is my grade this?". Now, I love a good song and dance routine but repeating the same number where I explain to a student how I figure out their grade was getting old.  The activity today was designed to help them ALL understand how they are being graded.  The lesson gets bonus points for being their very first collaborative activity where they have to think critically and communicate their mathematical thinking! LOVE that part!

I started by discussing the categories that I use and the weighting system for each.  Then, I gave each group one of four imaginary students and their fabulous (and not so fabulous) fictional grades.  The goal?  Every group was to calculate their student's current grade in my class. Easy right?  Ok, so I'm sure you detected my sarcasm. 

The task of computing these grades has multiple steps and is incredibly complex for incoming freshman who often aren't exactly the most eager learners when it comes to math. I knew they were going to need some serious scaffolding for this activity.  I never want my students' first experience with mathematical thinking in my classroom to be unsuccessful.  I need as many positive moments as I can muster to win their trust. So, I created three tables on one student handout to help walk the students through the process.  The tables absolutely did not tell them exactly how to do each step.  That would defeat the purpose. Instead, I gave each column a heading and let them talk about how they would get the numbers that would go in each column and row. 

I learned a LOT.  I learned which students would jump right in and were eager to figure out the answer.  I saw which students sat back and let others take the lead.  I observed those who struggled to take information and organize it in a table. I even heard several downright tell me that they were just incapable of understanding. Fortunately, I also saw a lot of "Aha!" moments. I witnessed students begin to talk with those around them about what they thought the best method would be. I saw students begin to work with a calculator in ways they had never been allowed to in their previous math classes. Most of all, I felt like every class gained something positive from the lesson.

Did every student know how to calculate their grade at the end of the day?  Well, no. But every student experienced what it was like to work together to communicate and to solve a problem.  THAT is something I can build on. I'm pouring the foundation and smoothing over the cracks.  We will get there.  Today was the first step.

Classroom Tour!

Today is First Day of School Eve. I'm not sure that is really a "thing", but I just coined the term because it should be.  All teachers know it well.  The night before the first day of class where everyone is a bundle of nervous energy. In honor of this night, I'm going to give you a photographic tour of my classroom.  So, keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times, and here we go!



This is my classroom as it looks from the doorway! There are eight tables that are stations for collaborative groups and the table closest to the door is for tutoring/RTI groups so that I can pull particular students to work with on needed skills.



I have a locking office! This is a huge commodity and highly coveted!

Supply center and wall of fame! By the end of the year, this wall will be covered with small scraps of scrapbook paper with student names written on it. Students who get an A on a test go on this wall and stay all year! On the shelf are the buckets where students store their interactive notebooks.

Small table is where I keep passes and students turn in work. The whiteboard has sections for me to post goals and bell work for each subject. On the other side is my schedule.

My schedule and class expectation in "Keep Calm" format.



Each table station looks like this!

Supplies on each table with seat numbers.




This is one of my favorite things! Every table has its own shelf to store textbooks, dry erase boards and markers, and tubs where we put task cards, game boards, activities, etc.

Professional Development Log

As the new school year starts, I wanted to take a moment and remind everyone of the importance of keeping track of all of that wonderful professional development that you have completed this summer or will be completing this year.  Below is a link to the tracking form that I use to keep up with the professional development that I have attended.  I generally log anything that I do that was not required by my teaching contract. This is a great artifact to use for evaluation purposes and a wonderful reference when updating my resume. Happy logging!

Professional Development Log

RTI: Common Mistakes

I know, I know.  I have been remiss in posting my thoughts about RTI. My promise of "very soon" got lost in the bliss of being a teacher on summer break.  Although I did manage to attend several more professional development opportunities including Engage Oklahoma and Northwest OEA Leadership Training, I haven't managed to stop enjoying my summer long enough to talk RTI.  I'm sorry, but not sorry at the same time. It's been nice to recharge.  I do solemnly swear that I have several posts coming as we venture back to school this August to make up for it.

Now, let's talk RTI. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I had the privilege of hearing Mike Mattos speak while at the PLC At Work Institute. It was a blessing to be able to sit and listen to his common sense approach to how RTI should work.  He has the incredible gift to be able to make it all seem so simple and straightforward. Of course, any educator that has been involved in any type of RTI process realizes that it doesn't always end up being so simple in the real world. Why is that? 
We know the most commonly addressed issue... time.  In order for RTI to be effective, it needs to be embedded within the school day and mandatory for students to attend. Many schools and districts have embraced this idea which is wonderful.  However, there now seems to be an attitude of "If you schedule it, they will learn." Schedules are being made where administrators and personnel are creatively finding ways to include RTI time, but there are several other key factors to RTI being successful that are too often being ignored.

Mistake #1: By Subject, By Standard

One of the most critical factors in a successful RTI program is how you group students for remediation.  Most schools get the first half of this right.  Schools must group students by subject. This goes beyond just keeping math and reading separate though.  Students need to be in groupings based on specific subjects being addressed.  If I was scheduling remediation, there would be separate times for Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2,  and so on. 

The next half of this is where things go really wrong a lot of times.  Students must also be placed into a group for remediation on a certain standard specifically.  All too often, we throw kids that we deem "low performers" into a room together and expect miracles to occur.  The problem with this is that those students may need extra help on different essential standards.  One may have mastered solving equations, but can't really graph them at all. Another may be able to graph, but couldn't grasp polynomials.  It becomes extremely difficult to address these areas of need because they all need something different.  Instead, educators need to shift our mindset and think in terms of essential standards.  If I know that graphing linear equations is an essential standard for Algebra 1, then I need to determine which students have deficits in that area and then bring them in for targeted remediation specifically addressing that weakness.  Doing this gives the teacher a specific goal to work towards (mastery of that standard) and allows for planning targeted activities and lessons to reach that goal.

Mistake #2:  Will v. Skill

In a world of "every student must learn it... no matter what... we mean it... or ELSE (insert dramatic music)", this is the enormous pink elephant in the room that everyone is trying to side step. I don't know of a single educator out there that doesn't want their students to be successful.  Of course, we want all students to learn. But, what do you do when the student doesn't want to?  Let's be extremely blunt and honest. There are students who don't want to learn. Gasp! I know.  We aren't really supposed to talk about it, but it gets even worse.  There are even students who actively do everything they can to not learn a single thing that you are spending precious hours planning activities trying to make for sure that they learn. These are your precious low will students.  That's right.  These are the students that frustrate the heck out of you because you know they could learn it. The problem is they don't want to bother with it.

These students are not to be confused with low skill students.  Low skill are the students that try and want to succeed but in some way struggle to learn the material being presented.  Sometimes low will students started out as low skill and then got so frustrated that they gave up and became completely opposed to trying.  No matter the reason why they have become low will though, these students have to have their lack of engagement addressed before anyone can begin assess and remediate their academic deficiencies. Counselors and administrators need to immediately begin the work of remediating the low will issue as soon as these students are identified by teachers.

Now, anyone want to guess what happens when you decide to throw the low will and the low skill students into a remediation class together? You'd be right if you answered chaos.  Ok, so maybe it isn't always quite chaos, but it usually looks a little something like this.  Teacher prepares great lesson to try to engage students in mastering standard.  Low will students refuse to participate or engage in the lesson. Surprised? Not really. That's what they do and when put in groups together it becomes of contest of who can refuse to participate the most. Low skill students try but need a lot of scaffolding and teacher support.  What is the teacher doing? Yep. Trying to get those low will students to actually do something so they can learn. For lack of a better analogy, it's like playing Whack-a-Mole.  You get one low student engaged only to see that several others have popped back up and aren't engaged anymore. So, what is a teacher to do?  Of course, rush to re-engage the low will students (without the actual whacking of course). What is happening to the low skill students while the teacher is engaging and re-engaging?  Plain and simple. Nothing.  Oh, they might be trying, but they aren't getting the support that they desperately need to be successful because the teacher isn't able to make them a priority.  This is the precise reason that low will and low skill students must be identified and dealt with accordingly.  Low skill need to be in targeted remediation immediately. Low will students must have their lack of effort addressed first. This does not mean that educators should give up on low will kids.  It only means that we have to be willing to admit that we can't help them learn until we get to the root cause of why they don't want to in the first place.

Mistake #3: Highly Qualified?

This particular mistake is a staffing one. It's very straightforward. The most highly qualified individual possible must be assigned to RTI. We must stop taking our new hires and inexperienced and giving them remediation classes.  Remediation should be taught by the best, brightest, and most experienced.  These are the teachers with the ability to take on this challenge.  RTI is not easy.  There are no quick fixes. It takes a skilled educator and a lot of dedication. Period.

The bottom line is this. RTI can be very successful. We all want our students to succeed, and schools and districts should absolutely be planning for ways to ensure this happens.  However, if they don't plan in the right way and take everything into consideration, than they might just be setting everyone up for failure.  A good RTI program allows for the right students to be with the right teacher at the right time working on the right standard.

PLC At Work Institute: Day 3

Day 3 of the PLC At Work Institute was all about Mike Mattos for me. I have SO much swimming around inside my head from what he had to say that I am going to write a blog very soon just about RTI.

Instead of tackling RTI today, I would like to reflect about the PLC process in general.  I've purposely reserved any blog posts about professional learning communities until I had a chance to take it all in and let the concepts marinate inside my head for a bit.

PLC's can be a complicated issue within school districts and schools.  People seem to have caught on that PLC's work to improve learning, but the implementation isn't always effective.  Unfortunately, I think that leaves many educators really confused as to what they are supposed to be doing.  PLC's end up seeming like another meeting that you have to go to and more acronyms you have to learn. Tim Brown said it best. "PLC's should not be one more thing you are adding to your plate.  Instead, they should simply be the way we operate."  Professional learning communities should be a way we go about teaching that allows for high levels of learning. Period. 

For me, one of the major downfalls of most PLC's that I've been a part of is that no one seemed to have the roadmap as to what we were supposed to be doing.  Let's be honest.  We're process people.  We math teachers enjoy our steps, and when we know the process, we can get anything done.  So here are the "Steps to actually doing this PLC thing people have been talking about so that our students will actually get something out of it" according to one math teacher who has done a couple PLC's and attended the PLC Institute. Catchy title, huh?  Keep in mind that all of this is done is cooperation with your team of teachers that also teach the same subject/grade level.

Step 1:  Know what you are supposed to teach.  This seems so obvious, and yet not everyone knows exactly where their content should start and where it should stop.  Identifying this and making for sure that everyone is on the same page is critical.

Step 2: Figure out which concepts your students absolutely have to know to be successful the next year.  Basically, we have to pick our "hills to die on".  Which concepts are so important that without them our students are doomed to fail the next grade?  These concepts are your essential standards. 

Step 3: Decide what order you are going to teach your standards, and how long you are going to teach each standard.  When doing this, keep in mind the essential standards?  These are the standards we should be spending the majority of our time teaching. All of the teachers on the team need to be in agreement and teach the standards in the same order to allow the next steps of the process to work.

Step 4: When you are beginning a unit on an essential standard, set a goal as a team for what you expect to accomplish during your initial teaching of the subject.

Step 5: Create a common assessment that measures students understanding of the essential standard.

Step 6: Teach. Every teacher teaches the concept in whatever way they choose within the timeframe given.

Step 7: Give all of the students the common assessment.  It's important to be sure that each teacher is giving the assessment in the same way.  Otherwise, data becomes invalid.

Step 8: Sit down with your team and analyze the data.  Look for strengths and weaknesses in teaching practice.  The goal of this is not to figure out whose "best" and look down on the "failures".  The point of this conversation is to unite together to decide which strategies are going to best fit the needs of the students you have so that every child can learn the concept.

Step 9: Intervention and Extension.  Refer those students who need help to whatever RTI is available and allow those who showed proficiency to demonstrate their knowledge with a task-based application of the content learned.  This is going to look different depending on how your school has their RTI program set up.  However, it can be as simple as one teacher taking those students needing help and providing re-teaching, and another teacher taking those students who have reached proficiency.

Step 10:  Reassess those students who were given interventions to see if they now have an understanding of the concept.  Without this step, the team has no way of determining if what they are doing in the intervention is working or not.

Once this process is completed, the team starts over at step 4 with the next standard being taught.  It becomes a continuous cycle of learning and improvement for the students and for the teachers. Teams that are functioning well can truly support each other and ALL students to reach our ultimate goal: learning!

Professional Learning Communities Flow Chart

PLC At Work Institute Day 2

 

Yesterday I was convicted of my reliance on good. Today, I reflected on ways we as educators convict our students. What is the excuse that you use when your students don't learn?  I'll give you a minute to think that one over.

 

The answer to that question could be different for everyone.  There are those that will sit on a really high horse and exclaim that they would NEVER make excuses.  To be quite candid, they're lying.  Everyone has done it.  We have all had students struggle or fail and immediately felt defensive.  The excuses are those things that fly out of our mouths in that weak moment when we are trying to protect ourselves.

 

EFFORT

 

For me, this is the number one math teacher excuse that I hear and have uttered myself.  It isn't exclusive to the math world by any means, but we sometimes sing this excuse in round at the top of our lungs. Because everyone MUST hear it. 

 

"If these kids would just do their work..."

"My students are so lazy."

"They don't want to learn."

"They don't even try."

 

The list goes on and on, and every statement points a finger directly back at the student and screams, "It's all your fault because I was doing my job."  It isn't pretty.  They aren't our proudest moments. It's reality though. We have all done it because it's easier to point the finger away from us than to confront the fact that we may need to change.

 

I've searched all my years of teaching, but I have never found the magic wand that makes every kid come into my classroom loving math and excited to work hard at thinking mathematically.  They don't come with a "try harder" button that we can excitedly press every time the students want to give up.  And I can tell a student a million times to "just try", but that doesn't guarantee a change in behavior.

 

So, what can I do?  I can't force any student to want to work really hard just by telling them they should do it.  The only thing I can control is myself.  Me.  The teacher in the classroom. Not the students. Or the principal. Or the district. Just ME.

 

While sitting in a session today, I was speaking with a math teacher from California. We were discussing Timothy Kanold's presentation of research showing that students must be praised for working hard instead of for being "smart".  The idea is that we should not be praising students for something they feel is fixed and cannot change. Students think they are either smart or they're not.  Therefore, success and praise isn't linked to doing anything, but rather it's linked to innate ability.  As educators, we know this assumption is false, but we need to communicate that to our students by giving praise and rewards when students really put in authentic effort towards learning.

 

Back to my Californian colleague. In a very mild mannered voice, he made a statement that should be common sense and yet gets completely overlooked in many classrooms and schools today.  He simply said, "We need to talk to them and show them what good effort actually looks like. Here's what I do to model good effort in my classroom." 

 

Wow! How simple, but how powerful is that reminder?  If we want students to work hard, we need to be willing to show them what that looks like and then hold them to that standard.  Good effort isn't writing an answer on a page. It isn't copying procedures.  Good effort is being able to show our mathematical processes and communicate to others what we did and why it makes sense.

 

Show them, and let them show me. Put in the effort.  After all, it's a two way street.

PLC At Work Institute: Day 1

 First thing this morning, I was assaulted.  Before I get a million e-mails and concerned phone calls checking on my well-being, I should clarify.  Have you ever had one of those moments where someone said something that completely caught you off guard and made you stop everything in its tracks, so you could ponder what they just said?  It happened to me this morning.  I was assaulted by a quote.  It snuck up behind me and caught me completely off guard.

"Good is the enemy of great." -Collins, 2001.

I'm guessing you weren't expecting something so simple. And yet, one slide into his presentation, Jack Baldermann made me stop and take stock of how those words apply to me in my professional life. Everything about those six simple words convicts me. I'm certain that it convicts many other educators out there as well. How many times have we used "good" as an excuse?

"I'm good at what I do."
"I get good results."
"It's good enough"

There are so many other "goods" out there.  The truth is that these "goods" are what hold us back as educators from being great.  We fall back on "good" instead of saying "I need to be great."  Let's be honest.  Don't our students deserve great?  Would we want our own children in the classrooms of teachers that strive for "good"?  Think about it.  Should we be walking around and saying, "It's okay. That teacher tried really hard to be good"?

 I would contend that as educators we should be appalled with this practice.  When did "good" become the end goal of education?  We should be striving to be great. And, no... I don't mean we should strive for great test scores. I mean we should really dig down deep and do what is best for kids. We are charged with helping and guiding them so that they LEARN.  So, shouldn't that be our benchmark?  Shouldn't we be asking, "What should they learn?" and "How can I make for sure they ALL learn it?"  Can't we change our dialogue from "I'm good at what I do" into "I'm good, but what can I do to make myself great and how can you help me get there?"  If we aren't capable of making that shift in our thinking, then we will always be "good" and never get to the GREAT our students deserve!