Remote Teaching - prepping for next year

I'm in the same boat as a lot of others, without a concrete plan for the fall yet, but with schools in my area leaning more and more towards starting remotely. Even if not fully remote, we will be at least hybrid in order to reduce the number of students coming to school at any time so my current plan is to assume remote instruction and to have in-person students join via Zoom to work with at-home students, if we do end up hybrid for some of the time. If conditions improve beyond current expectations, it's a lot easier to roll back and move towards face-to-face instruction than the other way around. This past month of summer break has given me a bit more time time to play around with tech tools, listen to webinars, look at my curriculum, and build on the work I did in the spring in teaching synchronously while remote. This blog post is an attempt to organize some of the work and thinking I've done so far in preparing for next school year. It's pretty long so I have no expectation that others will read, but I need to write out my plans for my own sanity.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I'm working in a small school where all students have school-issued laptops and where classes will be run synchronously via Zoom, which influences the types of instruction I can do, but please don't hesitate to reach out here or on Twitter if you have any questions for how this might look at your school.

I'm jumping into tech tools first to get them out of the way, but the important stuff is below, my unpacking of the most difficult part of remote learning - students' need for relationships, understanding, and agency.

Tech Tools during Class
The most useful tech tools that I used during class in the spring and that I plan to keep using in the fall were Desmos Activity Builder, Classkick, and virtual collaborative whiteboards for breakout rooms. I used Desmos AB and Classkick for students working individually - both platforms allowed me to see students working in real time and to give them feedback via comments in Desmos and by writing directly on their papers in Classkick. Desmos was better for content that involved graphing and making and testing predictions, while Classkick was better for students writing out their steps, working especially well for the small minority of my students who had iPads or tablets and could write with a stylus instead of their trackpad (but it also worked pretty well for kids with laptops only).  I remade a number of my lessons as Desmos activities or simply imported pdfs of problems into Classkick. The drawbacks of both of these platforms were that they did not foster collaboration between students, even if I put them in breakout rooms and told them to talk to each other. This was very surprising as students had been used to collaborating effectively in my classes before we went remote so there's clearly something about a remote space that is much less conducive to working easily together. One strategy I plan to use in the fall (as shared by @mpershan a few days ago) is to assign one student in each breakout room the role of sharing their screen.

OK this went so much better this morning. Did a short icebreakers WITH each breakout rooms. (This is camp and I have counselors in each room. Would be tougher if it was me and 20 kids but I think possible.) Also made clearer expectations: someone is sharing screen in every room.

— Michael Pershan (@mpershan) July 16, 2020

Teaching students how to work together in breakout rooms is clearly a new skill and one we'll need to explicitly teach and practice in the fall rather than relying on their face-to-face collaboration skills to just extend into online interactions. I'm considering how to amend structures like group roles and participation quizzes to work in breakout rooms, since I can no longer observe multiple groups at once.  For example, new roles could be: 1. Someone who ensures that a screen is being shared and everyone knows what they're working on, 2. Someone who pauses the room every 5 minutes and checks for understanding and who can call in the teacher if there's a group question 3. Someone who ensures that everyone is writing out their work and there is documentation for the breakout room.

It might be good to shift teacher feedback on collaboration to a peer- or self-assessment model in which students set goals around collaboration, then reflect to themselves or to group members ("in what ways did you contribute to your group today?", "in what way could you be a better group member next time?", "tell your group one thing they did well today" , "give a specific shout-out to a peer who helped you learn today"). A very concrete thing might just be to ask students to track the number of times they asked or answered a question in their group. I think it might also be possible to do an amended form of a participation quiz where I pop into breakout rooms and record what I see in a shared document, although I won't be able to project it to them in real time.

I'm also going to be looking to inject more fun and interactivity into breakout rooms - icebreakers, sharing something non-academic, Anne's concentric circles activity, something small that gets kids talking and sharing their screens and builds their comfort level with digital participation. In whole class discussions, using the chat feature of Zoom (set to "chat to host only") was incredibly helpful in drawing in shy students in the spring and I will continue using it to invite more participation and to get insights into kid thinking in real time.

In the spring, I also used virtual whiteboards quite a bit when I wanted kids to work on novel problems together or to go over homework questions. I bounced around a few different ones - assigning a page in Jamboard or a slide in a shared Google slideshow per group were great for students adding photos of their handwritten work and incorporating typed comments, but not great for handwriting. Bitpaper was best for writing and graphing math, but unfortunately, due to increasing use, they removed their free version for new users a few months ago (if you made an account before this and had some boards, you can keep using these for free, which is what I'm doing). GoBoard is probably my second favorite for writing out math work and has handy integrations with Desmos and LaTeX. If you have some money to spend, either Bitpaper or Ziteboard work really well for writing out math work and integrating photos of work on paper with handwriting and typing on a computer. If not, Jamboard and GoBoard are decent options.

Online whiteboards are going to be a big part of my remote plan this year as well, and I need to also be explicit about norms there - the role of writer should rotate, everyone works on the same problem, students should look for multiple methods or connections between problems, there should be a check for understanding before moving on to the next problem, work must be clear enough that someone not in the group could understand your process. As these will be largely used in breakout rooms, these norms will need to be incorporated with the breakout room participation norms. So! Many! Norms! I will have to be very intentional about rolling these out sequentially and creating a small enough list that won't overwhelm students. But I know that time invested up front in fostering effective group work will pay huge dividends in how well students are able to learn from each other and work productively together for the rest of the year in a remote environment.

The big new tech thing that I plan to use in the fall is OneNote digital class notebooks. There was a pretty steep learning curve to figure out how they work from the teacher side, but I think they're now ready to go for the start of school and should greatly simplify the coordination of classwork and homework, as well as giving easy feedback to students in real time so that I may no longer need tools like Classkick or Google Classroom to organize assignments and feedback. It also means that I'll want to build in some time at the end of class for students to take photos of their handwritten and Desmos or whiteboard work to insert into their digital class notebook and reflect briefly on their understanding. One of my big takeaways from the spring was that everything takes 50% longer when teaching a class remotely, but it is also documented more thoroughly. There is potential here for deeper learning, but I will have to account for the amount of time that things take and be focused on the most essential topics in the curriculum.

It might also be helpful to state that I'm not planning on investing a lot of time and energy into making content videos. I have provided curated video resources for students in every class for several years now and based on student feedback and my own priorities, I'm going to continue outsourcing this. I don't think it's worth it for me to record a lot of videos teaching math content when there are already so many out there, many made by people with way better video recording technology and know-how. In the spring, I did often make short videos in response to student questions or common errors on their work, and I will make these as needed again this year, using the Notability app for iPad and iPad's native screen capture or by recording a Zoom call with just myself in it and screen sharing from my iPad so that my face is also in the video. But these videos are going to be in response to student work, not a replacement for synchronous class time.

Relationships/Communication/Support
I'm thinking a lot about teacher-student as well as student-student relationships for the coming year and while I list out individual ideas below, I know that a conversation with my department and school about values and priorities is going to be the most important. We need to plan out how to care for students remotely, how to know how they are doing and what we can do to support them as students, but also as kids and people who are lonely, bored, scared, and disconnected from their normal support networks.

I loved a suggestion from Audrey around students sending her photos of things that have meaning for them (sounds like pets were a crowd pleaser) and starting each class with a student talking about that photo. She then compiled all of the photos for an end-of-year slideshow. Several others have also proposed converting Sara VanDerWerf's Name Tents, which is how I usually start the school year, into a digital form where students respond to prompts either in writing or via short Flipgrid videos. Teachers and students could respond to these with their own videos. This also made me reflect on the power of audio or video feedback to foster teacher-student relationships as this was something mentioned by several teachers who regularly teach online. I'm excited that OneNote will allow me to easily record an audio response to student work. I had been planning to use Voicethread to do this before I committed to OneNote, but I know that students really appreciated video responses to their work in the spring and that they help to humanize what could otherwise feel like dry content-focused interactions.

Another idea that I liked that was shared this morning in response to Julie's post on teaching in a hybrid model (in which students are split into two groups and each week, they rotate which group is at school and which group is at home) was assigning each student in a group a buddy in the other group who could help them know what was going on during class or let the teacher know if there were issues when their buddy was learning from home. In the spring, I used Padlet for students to post and answer each others' homework questions and ran an after school homework help time over Zoom where students could drop in and work with peers and math teachers for a few hours each week. I will continue using Padlet and running after school Math Lab, but am also considering other outside-of-class structures that might encourage more interactions between students. Study groups? More group projects? This is an area where I could really use the wisdom of the collective - how are others planning to foster student-student relationships in their schools?

One of the things I took away from a "Designing for Online Learning" course I completed at the start of the summer from Global Online Academy is the importance of clearly organized course materials and easy to access supports for students. I used a Google Site in the spring with a daily agenda so that students could easily follow the sequence of a lesson and know what was going if their audio or video cut out or they lost their Zoom connection. Moving to OneNote will make it easier to share monthly, weekly, and daily plans with students so that they have a clear understanding of the content goals and work they are completing.

I am also going to cycle in one-on-one conferences with students to find out how things are going, build relationships, set goals, and go over feedback together. I conferenced with the majority of my students in the spring and although it was a lot of time and work to set up, I felt that they were incredibly worthwhile, even more so in a remote setting than in face-to-face school. My students benefited, but I also benefited tremendously in my ability to empathize and support specific students. In my experience, making these meetings required and ongoing (once a month is a good frequency, I've found) is key. My school will also be setting aside one day each week for tutorial slots so those will also be great opportunities for students to access support. I will also continue seeking feedback from students on how things are going and using that feedback to correct course. Short, anonymous student surveys once or twice each semester, rather than an end-of-year longer survey, have been more helpful for me in getting actionable feedback. Relationships and timely feedback were critical in the spring for motivating students to show up to class, engage with content, and reach out for support, and I know they will be even more so with a new crop of students who don't know me or each other very well yet.

Curriculum
My biggest content take-away from the spring was the importance of student agency in motivating students to stay engaged and work remotely, without the norms of being inside a school building. I built choice into assignments, I let students select their own breakout rooms every few class periods and let me know how they would like to work during class, and I designed the end-of-semester projects to have options and to include a variety of student interests. Student choice to support differentiation is something that's been important to me for a long time and I presented on it this summer, but in a remote environment, I need to be way more organized with helping students set goals, receive timely feedback, and revise. I've done a bunch of curriculum work this summer to hopefully be in a place where more of my time is spent giving feedback and conferencing with students and less on writing problem sets and planning lessons. And I'm hoping that OneNote is a platform that supports organization of assignments, quick feedback, and revisions.

With respect to deepening the curriculum, I've also revised several projects to include more choice and to bring an anti-racist lens to student mathematical thinking. For example, the first 8th grade project for the last several years has been to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem from the many options available and present it to the class.

5.3 Pythagorean Proof Project - Google Docs by Anna Blinstein on Scribd

The revised project will include more of a humanistic look at how different cultures have used and thought about this right triangle relationship and why it is that we have named it after a Greek mathematician instead of the many others who also explored it. Students will learn more context and history of the mathematician whose proof they are presenting and the work of non-majority culture mathematicians will be celebrated. A key understanding for this project this year will be to critically examine who gets the credit for a mathematical idea and how different cultures come to understand, apply, and prove mathematical ideas. Two later projects (one on modeling data and one on using concepts of standard deviation and z-scores to analyze outliers) will have a social justice lens this year - students will still have choice in their research questions, but will be working within the realm of social justice topics.

I will also be focusing more explicitly on retention this year since learning remotely may really impact how deeply students are learning content and there may be more gaps from last spring. Working on a curriculum team this summer, we revised the standards for 8th grade to more explicitly connect back to earlier content and we've rewritten homework problem sets to spiral in previous topics. Sara VanDerWerf has blogged about her use of green reference sheets to better support students with gaps in prior knowledge and I plan to use a form of this as well, since we already start each unit with a pre-assessment to help us and students know what topics in the upcoming unit will need the most support. I've been incorporating an "Important Concepts" section into notes packets, but am still thinking about how to best use this with students. Should students be creating their unit summary page? Should there be more explicit use of teacher-made reviews and references throughout each unit? Since many class periods are structured around problem-solving and student-led exploration, with some time spent synthesizing and applying at the end, rolling out a summary of what students will learn ahead of time seems detrimental to that process. At the same time, many middle school students are not great note-takers and having a clear summary that can help them see the big picture or review and solidify what they explored in class seems like a good idea. I'm going to play around with summary structures this year that build off student thinking and will hopefully, have more to report on this soon. I'd love others' input on how they've integrated review and content summaries with problem-based learning.

Feedback and communicating with families

A goal I wanted to work on this school year is more systematic feedback on mathematical practices as well as better communication with families about what students were working on and their progress. I also wanted to do it in a way that didn't emphasize grading and evaluation and kept the student at the center of setting goals, reflecting on progress, and owning the process.

This blog post had a great suggestion for using Google forms to have students reflect each week and have those reflections emailed to parents. The prompts asked students to describe what they learned that week and how they feel about the class. To be honest, the directions for setting up the emailing were a bit too complicated for me and involved using Add-Ons that our tech administrator wasn't too jazzed about, so I did it in a way that seemed more simple and worked well for me. I'll summarize the deets below, but wanted to first say that I've done this twice now (students are reflecting every other week) and have gotten very positive responses from parents. It takes a lot less time than emailing individual parents, and I think it makes a big difference for parents to hear about progress in their children's own voice.

I changed the questions to be a bit more focused on goal-setting and learning. The questions I'm asking are:

1. What have you learned in the last two weeks? Be as specific as you can - feel free to look through your notebook.
2. How do you feel about your learning of this material, both from class work and homework? (3 = I can teach it to someone else; 2 = I understand it pretty well, but have some questions; 1 = I am very confused and/or have a lot of questions)
3. How do you feel about your class engagement and work? Have you been engaged and focused? Have you worked productively with a variety of classmates? Have you been a respectful skeptical peer and asked for feedback on your thinking?
4. How do you feel about your homework effort? Did you allocate time well during the week? Pick problems at a good challenge level? Stick with hard problems? Try different things? Ask questions? Make corrections during class?
5. What was your goal/next steps the last time you reflected? Did you make progress towards this goal? Why or why not?
6. What are your next steps? What should you keep doing during class and at home? What should you do differently? Do you need to follow up with your teacher?

To clarify, students have a lot of choice in their homework each week - they have an hour to spend on a problem set that has questions at different levels of challenge and depth so I find it helpful for them to reflect on their choices and make changes, if needed. They also have a single assignment due at the end of each week so they should be thinking about how to best allocate their time during the week to avoid leaving it for the last minute.

I make a new version of the form every two weeks and the responses feed into a spreadsheet. I also ask for their name so I can sort the responses alphabetically. I add a column at the end where I add any additional notes I want to share with the family. Usually, it's things like, "This is a great goal. It sounds like X is ready to try some harder problems on the homework next week." I have a list of parent emails that I can then paste in as well as two somewhat fancy things that make the whole system work (not that fancy in actuality, but let me get excited here for a sec). The first one is a cell that combines all of the student responses in one place for ease of emailing. 

The code to make that magic happen is: 

CHAR(10) just creates a line break between responses. The & symbol concatenates responses so that they appear next to the question. Otherwise, it just pulls the responses into a single cell. Drag down the formula to have this for all of the students. Then, add another column to the right that will track whether an email has been sent (this is useful if some students are absent and do this later so you end up running the email script multiple times and don't want to resend the emails that already sent).

When you're done, you have a spreadsheet that looks like this:

(your email sent column will initially be blank)

Okay, this is where the fun really begins. Under Tools, select Script Editor. I found a script for emailing from a spreadsheet and amended it to email two addresses. You can use it too. Ta da.

The code in that link is:

// This constant is written in column C for rows for which an email

// has been sent successfully.

var EMAIL_SENT = 'EMAIL_SENT';

/**

 * Sends non-duplicate emails with data from the current spreadsheet.

 */

function sendEmails2() {

  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();

  var startRow = 1; // First row of data to process

  var numRows = 28; // Number of rows to process

  // Fetch the range of cells desired

  var dataRange = sheet.getRange(startRow, 1, numRows, 4);

  // Fetch values for each column in the Range.

  var data = dataRange.getValues();

  for (var i = 0; i < data.length; ++i) {

    var row = data[i];

    var emailAddress1 = row[0]; // First column

    var emailAddress2 = row[1]; // Second column

    var message = row[2]; // Third column

    var emailSent = row[3]; // Fourth column

    if (emailSent != EMAIL_SENT) { // Prevents sending duplicates

      var subject = 'Bi-Weekly Math Update';

      MailApp.sendEmail(emailAddress1, subject, message);

      MailApp.sendEmail(emailAddress2, subject, message);

      sheet.getRange(startRow + i, 4).setValue(EMAIL_SENT);

      // Make sure the cell is updated right away in case the script is interrupted

      SpreadsheetApp.flush();

    }

  }

}

Notice that my script currently starts on the first row and processes 28 rows (I piloted this in two sections only). You might have more students so will need to process a larger number of rows. You do need to make sure you don't go too far and get to an empty row. The script doesn't like it when there's no data in a cell it's calling up. By the way, when parents respond to this script-generated email, their response goes directly to my regular school email address because Google is magical.

How do students have access to all of their reflections, you ask? I went a bit Google spreadsheet happy and added a tab to my master grading spreadsheet that pulls in the reflection responses for each student using the IMPORTRANGE function. Each student then has their own spreadsheet that pulls in just their reflection responses (as well as feedback on content learning goals). There is now a chain of Google sheets happily talking to each other and emailing parents every two weeks. What a world.

Formative Feedback

I've been thinking a lot about feedback lately. It started with this tweet:

@MrAbend I would be really curious as to what the Math learning/cognitive science research says about error types. Does @mpershan know?

— Anna Blinstein (@Borschtwithanna) April 15, 2017

@mpershan was kind enough to respond with an email and sent me down a rabbit hole of articles and blog posts about the usefulness of feedback. Since Michael was the inspiration for this journey, it's only fitting that I try to imitate his style of writing out loud to try to organize my thoughts on this topic (sorry, Michael - reading this back after I've finished the blog post has shown me that you are inimitable. Also, I should probably avoid writing blog posts at 11 pm in the future).

The central question we discussed was: what is the purpose of feedback? Clearly, it is only useful if it changes a person's thinking. Does pointing out a mistake do this? Does categorizing the mistake do this? Does indicating a student's level of understanding of a topic ala Standards-Based-Grading do this? Do questions do this better than statements? Do students need to reflect on the feedback or do another problem related to the feedback received or implement it in some other way in order to get more benefit from it? Written vs. oral? Immediate vs. delayed?

Feedback while kids are working in class:

This is the type of feedback I think I know how to do the best. When kids are working on a task, either on their own or with someone else, I am usually able to ask questions, point out features of their work, or connect them with other students' thinking so they can make progress, identify and correct errors, and clarify their own ideas. The one blind spot that I think I still have in this area is when a student thinks about a problem in a way that is really, really different from methods I understand or have seen and thought about before. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I'm really stumped. I can help them verify that their answer is incorrect. I can ignore their method and show them a way to think about the problem correctly or point them to another student in the class with a different approach. But if I don't understand it, I can't help them resolve the cognitive dissonance of their incorrect approach, which means that my work is not complete.

But in general, this is the type of feedback that seems to pay the most dividends. The kid is right there with their work, we can have a conversation, I can see if they are able to implement my feedback and give more or of a different kind, as needed, or ask them to work on a related problem. This is really the best case scenario in feedback world for me.

Feedback on homework:

Things start to get real hazy real quick when I'm looking at a kid's work outside of class and my feedback is now provided in written form or via a conversation with them the next day. Will they have time/inclination to do anything about my feedback? Without the option of a conversation, I have to make a guess, which I suspect is often not great, about their thinking and the amount/level of information to provide back and how to do that in a way that opens thinking rather than closes it. Honestly, I don't have any evidence that students get a ton out of the written feedback on their homework assignments. I've thought about building in class time to have students read the feedback on their assignment from the previous day and do something with it (since homework is turned in digitally and feedback is provided digitally, I have no idea how thoroughly students would be reading my feedback otherwise), but it seems like I could just use this time to talk to students of concern about their work or have the class do a problem related to an issue that I saw on many papers. We already go over homework questions in class before it's turned in and the answers are provided in advance, so presumably, they know if they are understanding the material. If I'm very concerned, I would rather email a student or talk to them in class or ask them to work with me outside of class. Spending lots of time writing comments and then flinging them into a black hole of ??? doesn't seem like the best use of my limited time. But not providing feedback on homework also seems wrong. So I'm at a bit of an impasse here. I've moved some of my homework grading (especially for bigger projects) to in-person conversation and in an ideal world, I would be able to do that for all of my grading, but time with students is a precious commodity.

Feedback on assessments:

This type of written feedback seems to go better than homework. I think that there are a few components that have made it more successful:

1. Students perceive assessments to be more summative and take feedback on them more seriously. They know it's a check of their understanding that will more directly be reflected in their grade (grades as motivation.... laaaaaame, but I'm not sure how to get around this... I have to produce some sort of grade at the end, and I like homework to be purely for feedback so that leaves assessments for grading). As a result, they read comments more carefully and are more motivated to figure out their mistakes and learn from them so that they can show more understanding on the reassessment.


2. I separate the feedback and grading parts to help students focus more on the feedback initially. When I grade assessments, I only write comments/questions (and try not to say too much since I know I'll be there in person to continue the conversation). I record their SBG grades on the assessment in the online gradebook only a day or so later, based on the research that showed that when students receive written comments and a grade on an assessment, they basically ignore the comments and only look at the grade, and that this is not helpful for learning. Getting back their assessments with comments only helps to keep the conversations on concepts and learning only, not on grades, as well as encourages students to work together with less comparison to others. 


3. We spend class time correcting quizzes, usually in groups that are either assigned randomly or by common error types. The quiz corrections are an assignment that is collected, they are not for "earning back points" (I don't actually understand what that means), but they are required in order to reassess. I ask students to analyze their error (did they misunderstand an aspect of the concept? execute a procedure incorrectly? make a careless mechanical error?), as well as redo the problems on which they made errors. Based on my thinking around this issue, going forward, I'd like them to also state what they plan to do to make progress on the issue identified. Michael seemed to think that identifying the type of error is not particularly helpful to students, but I think that when followed up with a "next step," it is maybe more useful?


4. I think that more students actually know what they should do to make progress with assessment feedback. They've done a lot of work with the concepts being assessed. They can talk to peers to understand other approaches, they can talk to me, we can schedule a meeting outside of class to work together, they can refer to online resources organized by content topic to review a concept or procedure, they can do practice problems from homework assignments and previous reviews related to this concept so the feedback is both more closely connected to a concrete goal and to ways of reaching that goal. 

So my main questions right now are:

1. How can I make feedback on homework more useful in helping students change their thinking?
2. Are there ways to improve both my in-class and assessment feedback?
3. How can I move more of my feedback to conversation and away from enigmatic notes that try to strike just the right balance of tantalizing hint/information-giving and hook to motivate kids to want to look at their homework again and rethink their approach, but that mostly get ignored or scanned quickly and not attended to? Did I mention that writing tons of feedback on homework assignments takes a lot of time???
4. Are there aspects of feedback that I'm not considering?

Using Canvas to coordinate written feedback

Yesterday, @druinok asked for suggestions on providing more written feedback to many students quickly.

I wish I had the time to give my students more written feedback without a grade attached. How do you fit it all in?

— Druin (@druinok) April 15, 2017

It turns out that we both use Canvas, an LMS, at our schools. There are a lot of features about Canvas that are not the most user-friendly, but in terms of giving feedback to students quickly and easily, it's been really helpful. Here's how I use it:

1. All work that I collect from students passes through Canvas, including work that is not graded, but is just for feedback. I create an assignment with either a link to a pdf for problem sets or to a Google doc for projects/written reflections
   
   
   

2. Students complete the work either in their Math notebook or in a Google doc (for projects/written reflections). But all work is submitted digitally. The student's view has an electronic submission button. Most of my students have the Canvas app on their phones and can submit by snapping a photo of their written work. Those that don't have the app take a picture with their computer camera and submit it via the web version of Canvas. I remind students to submit their homework to Canvas after we go over homework questions in class.
   
   
   




3. In grading mode, I see the photo each student took, mark the assignment Complete or Incomplete, and type written feedback. If the assignment is graded, I indicate their level of proficiency and sometimes comment on the specific objectives graded (we use Standards Based Grading so students don't see points, only learning objectives and levels of proficiency).
   

4. The system is quick - I can go through all the work submitted by students, type or copy and paste comments, and click on levels of proficiency if I'm grading the assignment. Students see the feedback on individual assignments and can also look at feedback from past work, chronologically or organized by learning objective.
   
   
   
5. I love the fact that students have access to all of their Math work in their notebook at all times - there's no longer the loss of time in turning it in, waiting for me to write feedback, and then getting it back, accompanied by the inevitable loss of someone's work and of me lugging piles of papers back and forth from school. There's no longer a question of whether something was turned in or what the feedback on that work was. We can both always easily see a chronological record of the feedback given over the course of the year and track progress. If I ever create a portfolio system for summative assessment, all of the student's submitted work is already digital and organized.
   
   
6. The one drawback that I wish Canvas provided is the ability to annotate directly on student work. If I want to draw a student's attention to a particular problem, I have to write a note that says, "In question #2, look at..." instead of just circling question #2 on their paper. When students upload their files in pdf format, Canvas has an internal marking system that activates and allows you to annotate, highlight, and type directly on the page. But for most students, this would add an extra step of converting their picture to a pdf and uploading it in that format, and I would rather make homework submission as simple as possible. So for now, this is my system.

#MtbosBlogsplosion - My Favorites

Carl and Julie have kick-started a new blogging initiative, and the timing is perfect, as I'm trying to get myself blogging more often instead of waiting for An Amazing Inspiration. This week's theme is My Favorites, and I wanted to share a really helpful framing for peer editing created by my awesome colleague. We've been working on using peer feedback more productively this year, and her document (shared below) gives a good structure for students to reflect on and give feedback to their peers' write-ups and oh hey, they also learn a lot about what makes for a good write-up and use this understanding to do a better job themselves. Mandy has incorporated a peer feedback step for all write-ups, with that night's assignment for students to revise their own work. I would love to do more structured peer feedback in other components of the class, such as homework assignments, note-taking, and studying for assessments. The setup is very basic - students exchange papers, give each other feedback, get their peer's feedback back, and turn it in with their revised write-up, documenting any revisions that they made.



Here's my first draft for a homework feedback form. Would love any feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Student meetings for formative assessment

This year is going by in a blur, but I did finally squeeze out a few minutes to blog about something that I've tried this year that I'm really liking. Based on a description in the book, "Creating Cultures of Thinking," I implemented something that the book calls Individual Feedback Sessions (I just call them "regularly scheduled meetings," but sure, pick the fanciest name you think you can get away with), which were created by a teacher profiled in the book. His explanation of this strategy is here, but the gist of it is:

1. Schedule 20 minute bi-weekly meeting with each student (he recommended meeting with 2 students at the same time, which I would do if I had a more typical class load). I meet with students before school, during lunch, during their free periods (if they overlap with mine), during tutorial, and after school.
2. Discuss work that the student has turned in during the last two weeks (since the last time you've seen them). Go through their work with them in detail, giving verbal feedback. Either you or the student records a summary of the feedback (I put comments in the online gradebook and ask students to also write some notes in their notebook).
3. Discuss the student's overall progress in the class, how they're doing incorporating feedback from previous sessions, and ask for questions about the content and for feedback on what you can do to support them better. Follow up on any issues that have come up in class with that student.

I have a schedule of meetings posted on the class page so students know when we're supposed to meet. For students who need a bit of an extra reminder, I have an automated email that emails them the day before our scheduled meeting. It is more work. I do have a much busier schedule during the school day as a result with almost no "free" periods. BUT, I do virtually no grading at home (other than quizzes, which I like to grade more quickly than a 2 week window would allow) AND I feel like students understand my expectations, really hear my feedback, and develop stronger self-advocacy and ownership of their learning. 

Grading papers at home by myself vs. interacting with an actual student about their actual work...
You do the math

Doing this has made it possible for me to assign better problems. I have been using IMP Problem of the Week tasks in my teaching for a long time, but every year, after grading a few write-ups, I became quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of grading (how the heck do English teachers do it??) and stopped assigning them. This year, I have already assigned four Problem of the Week write-ups for every class. And graded them all with students. And seen tremendous growth in their ability to describe their process and reasoning. Yes, I do think it's a valuable skill for students to learn to interpret written feedback from teachers, and I plan to do some of this in the second semester (perhaps, I provide written feedback first, then we meet and student explains how they understood it). But in terms of actually understanding and learning from feedback, in person conversations are waaaaaay more effective. Especially when I'm asking students to do mathematical work that they are not used to doing (writing about process, explaining reasoning, providing evidence, using formal notation and clearly annotating work, etc). Overall, I do think it takes more time, but it's much more fun for me and results in more learning for students so I think it's worth it. 

As the semester winds down, I am starting to ask students to give feedback to their own work and to the work of their peers so this is definitely not my only model for feedback. And as always, I'm curious to learn more about others' approaches and ideas on this.

Goals for 2015-2016

I find these goal-setting types of posts pretty helpful. Ideally, I will actually go back to this and reread it at some point into the school year. Maybe when we do the #1TMCthing check-in at the end of October? I just reread some of the goals that I had set in previous years and it's pretty hit and miss in terms of how much I actually accomplished. My main concern is that I have too many goals and it's maybe unrealistic that I will be able to accomplish all, but what's that terrible saying that I've seen in a bunch of classrooms that doesn't actually make any sense? Oh yes...

That literally makes no sense. The stars are farther.


Anyway, without further ado, my goals for the 2015-2016 school year!!

Grading/feedback

• Give back quizzes with feedback only, share the grade after class (we will have an SBG online gradebook this year that will hopefully make that easier), as described in this post by @mythagon.
• Students must correct original quiz and demonstrate evidence of work/learning done in order to reassess. They may not reassess on the same day. Still debating whether I want to put a limit on the number of attempts. I thought about making all of the attempts count (with a weight making the later attempts count more), but decided that this is not in the spirit of SBG.
• Teach students how to use feedback effectively. This was from @pegcagle's session at #TMC15 and is my official #1TMCthing that I have publically promised to follow up on this year. One way to do this is to give back feedback mixed up and not attached to assignments and have students in each group try to figure out which feedback should go to which person. Another idea that I want to try is to have students exchange papers and coach each other on what to do with the feedback they received. Last year, I did a bit of peer feedback prior to turning work in to me, with some success. I need to make this a more consistent part of my class.
• Incorporate homework and classwork into students' self-assessment of their practices. Last year, I asked students to do this for projects, but I would really like a portfolio each unit with self-assessment that is more global and includes homework and classwork with linked examples of their work as evidence. This idea is based on a post by @jacehan.
• I really need to get homework and projects graded more quickly so that students are getting feedback at a time when it's still useful to them. I got bogged down with grading big time last year, and I need to be better about staying on top of it. Update: after reading "Creating Cultures of Thinking" a few weeks ago, I would like to set up individual meeting times with each of my students outside of class every 2 weeks (we'll see if the schedule supports this) in order to discuss their progress in the class and go over their projects and reflections with them. One of the ideas in the book that I found really fascinating was that instead of thinking about time as the most limiting constraint, as we usually do, we can instead think about energy... what feels energizing and what feels draining. It might make sense to change something that takes less time, but is draining with something that takes longer, but energizes you. The example given was grading papers at home, which can be exchanged for in-person meetings with students with the paper graded in real time and written feedback accompanied by in-person interaction. I would like to try this model, knowing that it will mean trading off some time, but hopefully, will feel less painful than grading projects late at night.

Class culture

• Continue using daily random groupings and whiteboarding, as described by @AlexOverwijk to increase student participation and engagement. Based on a Twitter conversation with @fnoschese about gender balance in groups, in which he discussed the research that groups in which there are as many or more girls as boys have higher performance outcomes for girls than groups in which there are fewer girls than boys (single gender groups are okay), I will be tweaking the gender ratios in my random groups to help make them more balanced, if needed. But not always. It depends. Basically, it's on my radar, but I'm not 100% sure that gender always trumps other status issues and I really do believe in the overall benefit of visibly random groups.
• Continue my policy of having students volunteer to participate in class discussions, with the caveat that each person must participate at least once or they must start the next day's discussion. In addition, when groups report out, I can call on any member of the group.
• Introduce talking points and exploratory talk ideas into class discussions, as described by @cheesemonkeysf here and as described in a similar Visible Thinking routine called Micro Lab. Teach language of argumentation and mathematical discourse, as described in the Claim-Support-Question Visible Thinking routine.
• Continue assigning bi-weekly reflections as a way for students to reflect on their learning and also to build community and feelings of connection. Move from reflections that are only about learning and affect to reflections that also dig deeper into mathematical concepts and connections. Incorporate reflection questions into daily homework or exit tickets to have more formal processing opportunities and feedback on thinking routines and classroom structures and how they are impacting student learning. 
• Build student-student connections to strengthen class culture. I really enjoyed the activities that @sophgermain demonstrated in her session on restorative justice, which facilitate student-student connections in the classroom. Some examples:
• There are two circles of students facing each other, a question is asked and each person speaks for 1 minute on that topic (examples of questions and topics below), then one circle rotates to a new partner and another question/topic is asked.
• Making one circle for the class and popcorn or going around the whole circle sharing on a particular topic or to give appreciation to someone.
• Have students write their names on a piece of paper, then distribute randomly and each student must write something nice anonymously about the person whose paper they received. Can repeat this multiple times and then return to the original person.
• Ask students to share at the end of a task who was helpful to their learning and how. 

Homework

• Be more intentional about homework. I blogged about this here already, but I'd like to assign fewer homework problems, spiral it in more intentional ways, and always provide answers in advance and worked solutions from students' own work after we discuss homework in class. Homework will be organized into three sections: Review (questions/problems relating to old material), Reflect (processing questions relating to new material, connections between content), and Reach (deeper/harder questions from mostly old material).
• From @bowmanimal's post on homework, I'm going to ask students to give themselves feedback on their homework and emphasize it as a learning tool. I normally tell students to limit themselves to 45 minutes per assignment and then provide a day every 2 weeks that is a designated catch-up day when they are expected to go back to old assignments that were not finished and put more work into them. I will do this more explicitly this year.
• I am still playing around with how I want to handle homework questions. I tried using a Google form, as described by @z_cress, last year, and it was a bit hit or miss. Quite a few students simply didn't do it and of those that did, many filled it out too late for it to be useful in my planning of the next day. In @pegcagle's workshop, she discussed using entrance tickets as a way to assess which homework questions are worthy of discussion and to anchor that day's learning, with questions like, "Which homework problem was the hardest for you? Which homework problem was the most interesting?" I definitely like giving groups a few minutes to discuss homework questions together and asking students to present solutions to problems that many are wondering about or that are especially important, but am still working on how to do this efficiently and in a way that maximizes everyone's learning. I definitely treat homework as a vital part of class, with questions that bring out connections between topics and that preview new content or skills that will be useful in that day's learning.
• I will continue having students turn in pictures of their homework digitally while keeping an organized notebook. I really liked that students had access to all of their work and that I didn't have to track papers last year.

Other

• I would like to emphasize organization a bit more. Ideally (if I can make myself do this consistently), I would like students to create a table of contents at the front and number pages in their notebook. I was reminded of Magdalene Lampert's structures for student notebook writing in @sgnagni's post describing the sections that she had students create (Date, Problem of the Day, Experiments, and Reasoning). For my high school students, I am thinking something like:
• Date
• Questions being investigated
• Tasks/Mathematical Work
• Summary and Reasons
• I would like to continue giving students 5 or so minutes at the end of each class to organize their written work and complete the summary section of their notes. I started doing this halfway through the year last year and students felt that this was very helpful in solidifying their learning, especially if much of their work had been done on whiteboards and they wanted a record of their thinking for that day.
• I will spend more time planning tasks in anticipating student responses and how I will treat them. I did too much of this on the fly this past year, and while much of the time, it went okay, I am starting to see the benefit of spending more time on advance planning. I would also like to provide rubrics for all projects in advance. I did this sometimes and always got positive feedback when I was able to do it.

SBG: Assessing Mathematical Practices

In an earlier post, I wrote about the challenges of giving meaningful feedback without using grades as motivation. But now, I am thinking about the challenges when grades are part of the picture. Over the summer, we put together a set of mathematical practices (a mix of aspects unique to our school, Common Core, Park School's Mathematical Habits of Mind, and work done by Avery (his post on Mathematical Habits is here), who teaches 5th and 6th grade Math at our school). The five main categories are

• Investigate, Explore, and Play
• Represent
• Reason
• Communicate
• Growth Mindset

Within each one are four sub-categories and four "levels:" Emerging, Developing, Strong, and Leading. 

Mathematical Practices 14-15

This template formed the backbone of my feedback this year. Every chapter has its own content objectives, but the practices continue the entire year and are consistently being used by all of the Upper School math teachers.

In order for this to be useful to students, most assignments had a content component, which was assessed separately, and a practices component. No assignment included all of the practices, but each one included at least a few. I would let students know in advance which practices I would be assessing with a particular assignment/project. Sometimes, there would be a self-assessment component first ("highlight the level you think you have demonstrated for each practice assessed on this assignment and give evidence for your conclusion."). They would get back a rubric with the appropriate cells highlighted, along with comments and suggestions for improvement.

Pros: very specific and detailed feedback, it was very clear to students how highly the practices were being valued, they understood them better as they continued to self-assess and get feedback on them over time, they began incorporating the language of the practices in their overall reflections on the course and in their work for the class, and they demonstrated progress and growth over time

Cons: there are so many sub-categories and so much detail that it took a while before students were really clear as to what each one meant, it took an almost unreasonably long period of time for me to do each assessment and justify each rating, compiling all of this in a non-formulaic way for a final semester grade was a Herculean effort that I don't know that I can ever undertake again, and the sheer volume of feedback that this resulted in for students, families, and advisors was overwhelming and therefore not practical in the long run

The main change that I think we will make for next year is to eliminate the sub-categories. They can be there in the background if we want to make reference to specific aspects of each practice, but always including each one is just too much. I would also like to build in more time for students to revise their work and make improvements on a project they've gotten back rather than waiting for the next project or paper in order to improve. I'm currently in discussions with other 10th grade teachers to use the last week of the school year as a time for students to put together a portfolio that will include one paper or project from Math, History, English, Science, and World Language from earlier in the year, but revised and improved to incorporate the feedback and learning that has taken place since then. I would love for revision and iteration to be a regular part of the learning cycle in all of our math classes and for feedback to be a step along the way, not the end.

I also need more regular ways to give feedback to students on practices that are not always assessed on projects, such as ones having to do with their growth mindset and collaboration and contribution towards class. There is so much already to plan, assess, and give feedback on that this one definitely slips through the cracks. But I keep reminding myself that if I want something to be a vital part of the class and for students to make progress on it, I need to regularly assess it, give feedback on it, provide explicit instruction on how to improve it, and ample opportunity to revise and iterate and apply it again and again. It makes sense to me that quality is way better than quantity here. Decreasing the number of practices, but assessing them more often and with depth, clear feedback, and explicit instruction and mentoring of students to move them along the spectrum is much better than spreading myself thin.

Sequences and Series and Differentiation

Things are moving right along in my 10th grade classes. We wrapped up the Stats unit with some really fun individual research projects in which students created a question about our school community that they wanted to answer, collected data, and performed either chi square or z-tests to answer their questions. I was really, really happy with the level of work students put into their projects and how much ownership they took over their learning.

Here is a picture of the summary slides I asked them to create to summarize their research questions and conclusions. It was really nice to be able to display the results of our labors to the school community.

We started working with sequences and series. This is a relatively short unit and I am pretty happy with the unit projects, which were due last week. Students needed to create their own visual pattern, write recursive and closed form rules for the pattern and its differences and sums, and try to prove one of their formulas using induction. That last part proved really hard for just about everyone. Maybe it's because I haven't really taught proof by induction before, but it was just a painful slog for everyone involved. I have no idea how to teach it in a constructivist fashion as it seems so far removed from the way that most students would approach a proof.

The other challenging part of this unit for me has been appropriate differentiation. For several students, writing rules and finding patterns seemed intuitive and they flew through classwork problems, while others have really struggled and I could tell they needed more support. Most of what we do in class is groupwork based, which has its advantages and disadvantages in terms of supporting struggling students. They can get help and work with peers, but they can also chill on the sidelines and rely on others to do most of the work. I do call on random group members to explain the group's work, but this isn't the same as actually doing the group's work. There is also a big discrepancy between students who are seeking me out for extra help outside of class and those who are avoiding me. Spoiler alert: it's not the students who really need the help who seek it out, for the most part. 

When I teach middle school students, I feel comfortable emailing home or just telling a student that they are required to work with me during lunch or before/after school. For high school students though, it feels overly babyish to do this. I want them to have independence and learn to reflect on their understanding and ask for help. Conferences were a great time for me to communicate to students what I would like to see them doing differently, but the challenge now is to find the time to follow up with individual students and remind them of the commitments they made in their conferences. It's a tough balance between giving them freedom to make their own choices and mistakes and also coaching them in how to learn from those choices and mistakes. One thing that I would like to do is to meet with each student one-on-one right after Thanksgiving break to discuss their progress. As always, finding the time to do this is a challenge.

Digital workflow

In my previous post, I blogged about starting to use Google classroom with my 10th grade students this year. So far, I'm having not the easiest time with figuring out exactly how I want to use it. When you post to your classroom stream, you have the option of posting as an announcement or an assignment. Every time you post an assignment, Google classroom makes a folder with that assignment name and automatically drops work that students turn in into that folder on your Drive. However, students seem to be having a hard time using the "turn in" feature. For the assignment due today, they were supposed to make a spreadsheet of data (using a coin flipping simulator to flip coins and record the number of heads) as well as answer questions about their data. Apparently, Google classroom doesn't appreciate you trying to turn in two things for one assignment. I was told that there's an option to turn in one document and then add another, but I haven't tried this yet. Also, what to do for students who really want to answer the questions by hand?

This brings me to my second question... in the past, I have had students keep a very organized binder with sections. Not quite an Interactive Notebook, but something that could serve as a reference and be easily searchable and reflected upon. I had a great system for managing student workflow and feedback. Now that I'm using Google classroom, I'm trying to figure if I should go completely digital and have students create organized folders in Drive and scan/take pictures of their work or if I should try to maintain a hybrid system of some kind. My goal is for students to be able to compile and reflect on a portfolio of their work, as well as be able to turn in and receive back work in an organized manner. I'm a big fan of systems and right now, everyone is turning things in completely willy nilly and it's driving me crazy. I feel like I have this small window right now while the year is still in formation mode and students are eager to please to create an organized and simple system that makes sense for different types of Math work.

So please, clue me in to your wise ways. If your workflow system has a digital component, I would love to hear about it. How flexible are you? What's your take on helping students be organized? What do you do that you like or don't like? If you went all digital, how did it go? Tell me all of your things!!

Thoughts on homework

Julie put out a call for posts about homework differentiation, which came at a perfect time for me since this is something I've been thinking about recently. I'll get to differentiation in a sec, but first, some general issues that I'm having with homework:

It has sort of taken over my teaching life. We spend a lot of time on it in class, and I spend a lot of time on it outside of class. I am not sure if this is good or bad. The way that I do homework, students have all of the answers and must check their assignment and identify problems they have done incorrectly or that they don't know how to do. In class, students discuss their questions with each other in groups for about 5 minutes, then we make a list of questions to go over as a class. Students volunteer to present their solutions to the identified questions and answer any follow up questions from classmates. Those who got those questions wrong or didn't complete them are expected to make corrections to their work. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes, on average, which is almost half of the 45 minute class period. For my end, I look at each problem for each kid and write feedback on each paper. If there are errors or incomplete work or misunderstandings demonstrated, credit is reduced and students are expected to correct those assignments and turn them back in to me. Once the assignment meets my criteria for "goodness," full credit is given. Students are also required to write up corrections and explanations of their errors for tests and complete a journal entry reflecting on their progress each chapter. For my four classes, which have four homework assignments each week, the whole grading process takes me on average about 2 hours every day. That's a lot of time!!!

On the plus side, I think doing problems independently, discussing their thinking with other students, presenting their work and having to make sure that it adequately communicates their process, and getting regular, frequent feedback from me are all really helpful for their learning of both the math content and how to be a better student. On the minus side, it means that there isn't much time left for group explorations or as thorough grounding of each lesson as I would like, both in terms of how much class time is available and how much time I have to plan lessons outside of class.

I use this system not because I think it's super duper awesome, but because I haven't seen any other way that accomplishes the student learning piece better. A few things that have helped me be slightly more efficient:

1. If I see a bunch of errors, say three or more, I stop grading the paper and write a note to the student reminding them that they need to check their answers and make corrections, either on their own or with help from me. The assignment doesn't get any credit until that happens. I don't want them relying on me to check their answers for them, and I want them to come in and get help.
2. As the year continues, I start restricting the amount of time given before corrections can be turned back in to me. Eventually, they are not allowed to correct any more and must come in and get help before turning in the work in the first place. This helps them transition to their future math classes, none of which allow corrections on homework assignments. 
3. I try not to assign too many problems and assign ones that I think are meaningful and helpful to students' learning. Kids do see the connection between putting effort into their homework and their learning and progress in the class.

But really, this is a crazy inefficient system, especially in terms of my time use. I don't know about everyone else, but grading homework for me is somewhere up there between having hot pokers shoved into my eyes and being trapped in an airless mine shaft. It's seriously obnoxious. But I hate the idea of just grading based on completion because then there's no feedback to the student and much less of a connection between homework and learning. So, I'm stuck with my current system unless someone has any suggestions.

Okay, on to differentiation!!

So I don't currently actively differentiate a lot of homework, other than test corrections and journal entries. There is a good deal of differentiation that happens as a natural outcome of how I structure homework though because students who didn't get full credit on assignments have to correct them, which means that they are addressing their own specific misunderstandings. Also, students who score less than 70% on a test are required to complete extra work as well as meet with me.

Here are some other ideas of things I'd like to try:

1. After a quiz, breaking up the class into groups based on the types of mistakes they made. Each group will have all the kids that need to work on a particular concept together. Then, I can work with each group to reteach/address misunderstandings on that topic and their homework will be problems targeting that specific concept. The kids that rocked the quiz will work together on a challenge problem. Their homework will be to complete it and do a write-up of their process.
2. In my regular-paced class, which is completing Algebra 1 over two years, we often spend two days on a learning target. For the first day, I'd like to assign everyone the same basic homework assignment. Then, for the second night's homework assignment, students will have the option of either doing more basic practice OR to do a more challenging, shorter set.
3. I loved this post by Bob Lochel that I recently read about differentiating homework assignments in which different problems are worth different point amounts (depending on difficulty) and the students complete enough problems of their choice to earn the assigned total point value.

Looking forward to reading everyone else's differentiation strategies and ideas.

Student feedback

Going through 8th graders' feedback from an anonymous Google form that I had them fill out last Friday is kind of amazing. It's funny to me how few of the comments have anything to do with Math, and everything to do with our personal connection or the community they felt in our classroom. I was also reminded that what they most remember from the course are the hands-on activities, projects, and lab experiments. Far and away, their favorite activity this year was the programming project (using the Bootstrap curriculum, I blogged about it here). But they really did take in a lot more stuff than they appeared to at the time. This is my first year in a long while teaching the "regularly paced" group (we have "accelerated" and "regularly paced" for all Math classes starting in 7th grade), and I am actually quite impressed with the maturity and attitude toward learning. We get bogged down in the day-to-day and forget how much growth these kids are making in a given school year and that they give as much back to us as we give to them.

Some of my favorite quotes:

"You were very open to questions and were wise with your responses not to give away the answer." Seriously impressed by this kid's maturity.
"i learned alot this year but I don't remember that much of it."  This is more like what I'd expect from an 8th grader :)
"Algebra is something that I can actually see using in real life situations." I love that someone is taking this away from my class
"Even when mistakes were made, you still respected me and never held it over my head." Okay, this one just made me aww. We should pat our own backs every once in a while.
"I agreed with all the grades I got. Though I still honestly don't understand why i need to label my axes." I'll let next year's Math teacher continue fighting that good fight.
"I enjoyed taking the final test." I really want to know who this kid is! This is what he/she listed as their favorite part of my class!! <mind blown>

Some recommendations for next year:

"let the students give more feedback" Yes, I do need to incorporate this more into daily classroom routines. I'm curious to hear how others incorporate student feedback into their classes.

"Do more projects." Totally agree... will be working on developing more this summer.

"On ocassion play a game that has nothing to do with math to change things up." Probably more games in general would be a good thing. I would love input on this one too.

My Google form survey for students

I also thought about soliciting feedback from parents, but didn't organize myself enough to do it this year. I thought that I would ask just a few questions (Did you feel that there was enough communication from me? How could I have better supported your child? Any other suggestions for improvement?) and email it out via a class mailing list. Any feedback about parent questionnaires would be appreciated!!