Groups, Individuals, and Individuals with Groups

Here's something I copied off a classroom wall at Mission HS.

Imagine it a lot prettier with stick figure examples.

I don't differentiate between these three very well (at all) with my students. The always insightful Grace also pointed out to me that it helps the teacher differentiate the three types of activities. Often a teacher calls something "group work" but what it really is just students working in parallel. It's one of those "no duh" moments I always have when I walk into someone else's classroom.



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Addendum: Something I forgot to mention in my last post. Mission HS is experimenting with Geometry for every 9th grader regardless of whether or not they even took Algebra in 8th grade. During the class they emphasize the algebra components within geometry, mainly working with the coordinate plane, graphs, and solving equations. As sophomores, students then go back to either taking Algebra or Advanced Algebra.

They had a whole bunch of interesting reasons. They felt students could use a fresh start and didn't need their math history to haunt them into high school. Geometry itself is so different that perhaps students who hadn't had success in math would find something in geometry. Their freshman courses were heavily skewed along racial lines. The standard math sequence is screwy anyway since you'd be better off doing Advanced Algebra (Alg II) immediately after Algebra instead of having a year off with Geometry.

I'm curious to follow up next year. Last year I wrote about how inspiring the group of math teachers are and nothing I saw changes my opinion. I really don't know if Geometry for all ninth graders is a good idea. Someone in California politics thought Algebra for every 8th grader was a good idea. But they're willing to stick their necks out and experiment and do what they believe is the right thing.

PS - Mission is the school featured in the article Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools is Wrong.

Creating Balance: Reflections

This is the second year I've gone to the Creating Balance conference. I've been kicking around a couple of longer reflections but wanted to do something quick while it was still fresh.

First off, this happened:

That's Brian Lawler, me, Avery Pickford, Bree Murray, and Grace Chen at Tacolicious. Earlier in the day, I had Korean tacos and Grace and Elizabeth had french fries smothered in Korean short ribs.  Great people. Great food. Anything else is just a bonus right? It's a strange time to live in where you can go to any conference in any place and know people.


Complex Instruction:

Last time I went through a Complex Instruction strand. One of the things I mentioned is I still saw certain students take over and lead the group. This time one of the teachers at Mission pointed out that what we're seeing is just a snapshot. Sure it might look like one person is dominating the group. But last week it was a different person. He said you need to be intentional about designing different tasks for different strengths. The lesson I saw was about calculating the surface area for three-dimensional shapes and very clearly certain kids took the lead. He said last week they used GeoGebra to explore (something) and I might have seen a different set of kids leading.

If there's something that I need to keep coming back to with CI, it's that we need to actively work to redefine what it means to be smart in mathematics (and science and everything else).


Parent Outreach:
I've previously written about previewing content ahead of time instead of waiting to remediate in order to address status issues in class. I sat in a workshop with two people from the UCLA Mathematics Project who did the same thing but with academic-focused parent nights. The teacher, Brett Davis, would lead a workshop (Wed/Thur night, same content each night) previewing the math his students would be learning for the next 6 weeks or so. He would start with an engaging launch activity and do some of the math with the parents and add a bit of vocabulary. From a practical standpoint, this was mostly stuff he'd be doing anyway so there wasn't much additional planning involved, unlike with the more common Family Math Nights where the focus isn't as academic.

Brett made it clear he wasn't expecting parents to become experts in the math but his goal was to change their relationship with math and to open up lines of communication from parent to student and parent to teacher.


Rochelle Gutierrez

Dr. Gutierrez was the keynote. I want to blow this out into a full post at some point but I'm hoping Bryan Meyer will take care of that first (edit: He did.). If you have access, the latest JRME is all on equity. Until then, three terms Dr. Gutierrez brought up. She called teachers "identity workers." She also introduced me to the term "nepantla" which is Nahuatl and represents something like "the space between" ("the and and or and both and neither"). Finally, she distinguished knowing of your students/communities from knowing with your students/communities. She used the term conocimiento which in Spanish translates to "knowledge" but, if I'm understanding this correctly, has a communal connotation. I'll need a waterfall, a tree, and lifetime supply of incense to work out the implications for all of this.

She also mentioned she teaches her future teachers about "creative insubordination" and how to Play the Game, Change the Game. If you know me, you know I'm more insubordinate than creative so she's one I'm going to need to keep following.

I found her article Embracing Nepantla through a google search.



The Br(y)(i)ans

Brian Lawler and Bryan Meyer led a session. Bryan has blogged the main focus so I won't recap but it was mainly on the tensions involved in launching a problem. This is something I definitely struggle with. How do I respect the ideas and motivations of my students without leaving any science on the table?

I enjoyed the dynamic between the two of them and want a professor to adopt me.

Lawler casually mentioned his pre-service teachers write a PBL lesson that they have veteran teachers implement in their own classrooms and then get feedback. I want more information about this.


Elizabeth wrote about a session I shared with her and Brian Lawler.


Random Presentation Feedback

If there's one piece of advice I kept leaving on feedback forms it was "Know your audience." I'm at a conference on social justice and mathematics. I think there's a certain amount of savvy you can expect from this group and we don't need to spend the first 45 minutes discussing why creating mathematical identities are important. And in such a focused conference, you'd want to up the level on a Day Two presentation.

Your final slide should show your contact information.

I was on Twitter the other day blasting the Jigsaw strategy. David Coffey rightly pointed out that it had good uses. I agree but I think if the ultimate goal of the jigsaw is "summary," you're probably doing it wrong. There's a big difference between splitting up 4 articles and having you summarize them and splitting up 4 articles and having you analyze a scenario based on how you think your author would respond.

I don't think I'm a fan of audience participation in the beginning of a workshop ("discuss at your table and share....."). It feels a bit false and flat. I know the presenter is not doing anything with our input because the slide deck is already created and I've got the handouts.

As a teacher, I can gather input from my students in the beginning and use it to help influence the next few weeks. In a one-shot 90 minute session, the presenter is coming in and driving the bus. The presenter should respond or clarify and listen to anything the audience has to add, but they are not changing course entirely.

Also, and I know I'm guilty of this with my students, I think I'm sometimes being tricked into offering a "wrong" answer so the presenter can use that as a launching point.  I'd much rather respond to something the presenter said towards the middle or end of a workshop.

Product Placement

This is about honesty.

I went to a conference last week at Stanford. One of the panels was on equity. Hey! I just went to a whole conference on equity. There were five people on the panel. Three came from organizations that deal with policy and research. The two people who were actually educators were from Rocketship Education and a Los Altos school.

That seemed...odd.

Some background for people not living in the Silicon Valley.

Rocketship is well known locally for its blended learning model and for its very high API scores with a high poverty, high English learner population. It is also well known locally for its high dropout rate and for avoiding the local school districts and going directly to the county office for approval of expanding to 30 schools. It's also well funded and if I'm reading this financial report (pdf) correctly, it gets about 30% of its money from "contributions."

Los Altos is one of the wealthiest areas in the nation. Actually, according to this Yahoo Finance article, it is (or at least it was three years ago) the third wealthiest. The school being represented has a 978 API (out of 1000), 4% of its students are on free and reduced lunch (state average is 52%) and 4% of its students are English language learners (24% state average). This year, its educational foundation donated over $2 million dollars to its 9 schools.

Two extraordinarily wealthy schools, one through geography and the other through donations, were picked to talk about equity. Especially when, hypothetically of course, a primary argument that may or may not have been put forth is that money doesn't matter.

So why might these conference organizers choose two educators from schools that might not be the best representatives to talk about equity?

From the conference website:

I surfed over to the NewSchools Venture Fund website and clicked on Our Ventures to see where their money was going.

Oh look......

and sitting on the Rocketship Education Board....

But what about the Los Altos school? She was actually there to talk about Khan Academy. It turns out she's from a pilot school.

Three lines above the Rocketship sponsorship on the NewSchools funding page you get......

That panel makes a lot more sense now.

I have no idea if NewSchools (or SVEF who also partners with Khan) had an agenda. I doubt it. I think its likely these were just the first two groups that came to mind because they work so closely with them.

The credibility issue is killer though. I had a hard time listening to anything after this panel.

The sad thing is I would have been happy to have sat in on a presentation about Khan in the classroom and what Rocketship is doing with blended learning and their data monitoring system. I felt like the organizers were hiding something by sticking them into an equity panel.

Does every conference have to be sponsor-free like Creating Balance? Heck no. I enjoyed the ASCD conference immensely and it was like a NASCAR race. I expected Pearson to come out shooting a t-shirt cannon between sessions. I don't even want to know what went on in the Smart Board party bus.

I don't have a problem with that. I know conferences don't pay for themselves. I'm happy to ignore the vendor tables if it is going to bring my registration fees down.

Just be honest. If I'm going to sit in an hour-long advertisement, let me know ahead of time.

(Final note: I've been sitting on this post for a few days. I didn't want it to seem like I was specifically targeting the parties involved. I want it clear that I'm just using them as an example and the point is really about transparency. It could have been anyone.)

Creating Balance: Complex Instruction

Sorry. Another long post. The next one will be shorter.

At the Creating Balance conference I went to the Complex Instruction strand. I went through the strand with Sue VanHattum who has blogged about it previously. Bree lead a separate session on it. If you don't know what CI is at all start with those because I'm going to skip over the basics. I breezed through the section of Sue's post labeled "Smart in Math" the first time, but facilitators said that expanding the definition of what it means to be smart in math was the most important part of CI. We observed three high school classes of different levels and then sat in about 3 hours of teacher-only sessions.

Things I found interesting:

What I most enjoyed was talking with the teachers at Mission High School. The teachers I spoke most with were named Carlos and Betsy. They were incredibly reflective about it and their journey to CI was pretty inspiring. It started with 3 or 4 teachers going to a workshop a few years back and eventually it spread to all 13 teachers. Hearing about all the work they do together made me have conversations like this with a math teacher friend from NY:

Me:"So....I kind of have a crush on this school."
Her:"Yeah, let's work here next year together. I'm not joking. I will do it."

Sue mentioned creating rich tasks as a major implementation problem for CI. The Mission teachers work together to create them. They have put curriculum binders together and include spaces to write your reflections and how you would change the task for next year. They set up the department so every prep will always have at least one teacher who has taught the course last year but the same teacher won't teach the same course more than three years in a row. I asked Betsy about this second part and she said they felt that you start to go on autopilot after a few years and you should always be looking at the curriculum with fresh eyes.

They worked out a schedule to observe other teachers. They felt this wasn't quite enough so they also worked out a schedule to get together and watch 5-minute clips of each other every month.

There was more. As a teacher who has always been too much of a lone wolf (both because of my personality and my situation) I spent half the day in a sort of daze.

As for Complex Instruction, three things stood out for me.

1. The lack of scaffolding.
2. The complete commitment to "learning together."
3. The focus on mathematical conversation

Sue shared this problem and we did it as well:

Image from Math Mama Writes

The problem was, "What would number 100 look like?" and "What would number -1 look like?"

If I had done this problem it would have started with number 5, number 6, ask for a pattern, etc. They jump straight to 100. For CI, the group is the scaffold.

For number 2 above, a lot of teachers commented on this both positively and negatively. The teachers all were very strict about enforcing that students work together. They had even installed "checkpoints" in their worksheets so that students couldn't move on unless the teacher had come over, asked a random student in the group to explain what they'd done, and checked them off. I don't think I saw a kid who was completely lost, which is rare in any class.

The flip side was seeing the same problems you see in a lot of group work. Certain kids would drag along other kids. A kid would go to the bathroom and the rest of the group would grind to a halt.

You can usually solve the "dragging a kid along" problem with good grouping and the Mission teachers were very attentive to that. I'm not sure what can be done about the bathroom problem.

Maybe its because I'm used to middle school kids but I was impressed with the amount of mathematical talk that came out of the students mouths. The teachers all did occasional participation quizzes and focused far more on how students were working together rather than the correctness of the answer. In the pile pattern problem above, Carlos said that the -1 question is really what he cared about because, "That's where the really good conversation happens."

Things I haven't resolved in my head yet:

I had written more but before I finished writing this post SciAm posted an article titled, "The Power of Introverts." We spend a lot of time in groups in my own class but if I were to give the students something like the pile problem I'd always ask them to try to think about it on their own first. I know I need quiet time to think first.

(Update: I feel the need to point out that whenever I see something that says classrooms have too much groupwork. I.....don't see it. I mean, I know people talk about groupwork, but I've been in a lot of classrooms and most of them are still teacher in front and students in rows the whole period. I think there's still too much of that but I feel negatively about all groupwork all the time. "Creating balance" was the name of the conference.)

Betsy arranged her class so that Mondays looked like traditional school. She'd mini-lecture and kids would read the textbook or do worksheets. She said some kids just needed that individual time. (Like I said, reflective group at Mission).

The other thing I struggle with is anytime I need to "teach behavior" or norms. I just never know when I'm teaching something universally valuable and when I'm imposing some sort of "cultural other" upon them. Am I teaching kids how to work together or am I teaching kids to copy an image of what I think kids working together should look like? What am I asking students to give up in order to be academically or socially successful in my class?

I read too much into this. Perhaps this is why I'm an awful classroom manager.

Status Change

I'm at the Creating Balance conference and have been thinking about status. I'll write more about the conference later.

I've got two things to share, one classroom and one schoolwide (neither are original to me) that I think help address issues of status.

Classroom:
Robyn Jackson had an article on ASCD where she describes a red flag system she used to immediately catch kids as soon as their grades fell to certain levels. I would like to think one day I'd be organized enough to pull something like this off but today is not that day. One thing I liked was that she would preview the lesson for some kids. I know I fall into the trap of just catching kids up and I liked this immediately.

The hard part for science was that so many times I couldn't really preview the content well. We'd be developing a concept in class and it was hard for me to figure out a regular schedule where I'd be able to preview content ahead of time without giving away what he or she was supposed to be figuring out.

Where I modified this to fit was with classroom behavior. If you're a science teacher you know that when you have a lab, there are some kids who you have to just sit on. As soon as you get a lab going they're mixing random chemicals together or wandering around to talk to friends or whatever.

For about 10 kids I started previewing our labs. The day before a lab I'd ask some kids to stay after school and then spend about 10 to 15 minutes showing them the equipment they'll be using and making sure they knew how to handle and use it. I'd show them what their eventual setup would probably look like and some common pitfalls. I'd let them know what they were trying to figure out and, depending on how much I could give away, preview/review some content.

Status change right? These 10 kids didn't start off lost and immediately could contribute something valuable. For half the kids it was magical. They were like new students. They were in there leading the way. I took secret pleasure in watching the low status kid instruct the future valedictorians on how to use the overflow canisters or admonishing someone for grabbing the beam on a triple beam balance. There were another three who would start off well (the parts they had previewed with me) and then start to lose it when they got into new territory. Two kids it didn't matter.

Overall, really good bang for the buck and, just as a teacher, I've had a nice mental shift from always looking for how to review to also looking for ways to preview.


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School:
A couple of years ago I went to visit a nearby school. They dedicated themselves first and foremost to principles of community and it showed. They do this sixth grade orientation that I shared with a teacher at my (former) school and she started it up. She, by the way, is a far better teacher than I am. I take zero credit for this other than sharing the idea.

The middle school first works to identify fifth grade students who are at risk of dropping out, mentally or physically. They invite those students, perhaps a dozen, to a three day orientation a week before any other 6th grader starts school. Those students are all assigned an adult mentor and they're shown around school and introduced to the quirks of middle school life. There's a bbq on the last day and the parents are invited.

Here's the part I love. On the first few days of school those students get a special (colored shirt? a giant button? I can't remember) that identifies them as someone that other students should ask for help. For example, a huge thing for sixth graders at that school is how to open their lockers. These students know because they've been practicing. Again, status change. At the old school, I was the dummy. Here, I'm someone who other kids ask for help. The adult mentors check in from time to time but the bulk of the work is accomplished in those first few days.

At my school, the teacher in charge also teaches the Leadership elective (they do rallies, dances, fundraisers, etc) and she monitors them as sixth graders and tracks them into the leadership elective as 7th graders.

When I first visited the school, the principal reported that since starting the orientation (perhaps 6 or 7 years at that point) every single kid involved had been able to participate in graduation ceremonies after their 8th grade year.

I can't tell you how much I love this.

Our default action for an incoming at-risk fifth grader would be to schedule an extra "intervention" class. In other words, a student comes to a new school and the first thing we do is confirm that his/her status has managed to follow along. And yes, I'm looking directly at you Ms. High School Counselor who gives our outgoing 8th graders math support, reading support and no electives as freshmen.


Addendum: Bree just wrote about a presentation she did at the same conference addressing issues of status.