Mathsational

Here is another better late than never #SundayFunday post :) At least this one is only 5 weeks late and I'm making up ground! Here is more info if you'd like to join in the fun. It's really no surprise that I ended up being a teacher. I had a very difficult childhood. I won't go into the gory details, but although my mother did the very best she could with the resources she had, she could not protect me from everything. My early life was filled with neglect, hunger, inadequate shelter & clothing and abuse. I was surrounded by illegal activities and poor role models. At school, no one knew what I was going through and no one treated me differently. That is exactly how I liked it. I did not have the means to develop skills in areas like music or athletics, but I could take advantage of my free appropriate education. I quickly learned that if I worked really hard, I would excel, and that is exactly what I did. I loved the feeling of control that I ha...

Goals, I have too many right now.  This Sunday Funday prompt comes at the perfect time for me to solidify them and hone in on just a few so that I can reach those goals. My big aspirations for the year include tweaking my past standard based grading policies and well as blended/hybrid learning structure. I also want to begin to incorporate HyperDocs, visual random grouping, vertical non-permanent surfaces.  Finally, I'd like to include more projects and technology in my classroom.  And this is the narrowed down list! First, I'll start with HyperDocs.  I came across this book  The HyperDoc Handbook: Digital Lesson Design Using Google Apps  in my efforts to reorganize my blended/hybrid format and to include more meaningful technology.  The idea of HyperDoc is to create an interactive student-paced lesson.  One of the issues I've had in the past few years has been getting my students to engage at the independent station with fidelity.  ...

This year I made a goal to tweet one picture from my class each day.  I'm also trying to blog bi-weekly about what is happening in my classroom.  Here are the tweets from days 11-20. Day 11:  On this day, algebra 2 students reviewed linear inequalities by playing a game of 3X3, which is similar to bingo.  There are 4 boards and a deck of cards.  In each group of four, students turn a card from the deck face up.  The card has a linear inequality.  Students look at their boards to see if they have the matching graph.  If they do, they mark that box.  The first student in the group to get 3 in a row wins.  Play can continue for second and third place.  I found the original assignment from  @MathBerts   here .  And  here is a link to the the document that I edited.  I blogged about this activity last year as well. #teach180 #alg1chat tic tac toe with linear inequalities pic.twitter.com/Gq9kRrOmDa — Je...

This year I responded to @mathequalslove 's challenge to join #teach180. This will be a challenge for me, but I'll give it a go! https://t.co/Vv0UQQSpGj — Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) August 22, 2016 I have to admit that I thought I'd have more trouble remembering to take a picture every day.  In reality, I almost never take a picture during class because I'm so busy teaching and working with students.  However, I remember to take screenshots of our notes or an online activity or I remember to take a picture of student work at the end of the day. This year I'm lucky enough to have only 2 preps, CP geometry and Honors algebra 2.  I try to represent both classes equally in my #teach180 posts. Now, finding the time to blog about this has been a whole other challenge.  I'm aiming to collect my tweets and reflect on a group of them every other week.  So here we are, finished with 41 days of school.  I'm going to try to blog about 10 days at a...

I feel a bit weird about organization, because my system is far from perfect and I still need to work on this myself.  My main issue, now that I'm entering my 13th year in the classroom, is that I have way too much stuff.  Luckily, I've switched classrooms at least once every three years.  This has at least forced me to purge once every few years.  So that is tip number 1. 1)  Purge often.  Don't wait until you need to move all of your stuff for a new building or a new job or for retirement.  Go through all of your stuff every spring and/or fall and get rid of as much stuff as possible. 2)  Digital Folders.  I have a flash drive with literally thousands of files.  I need more folders to organize.  I have folders for each course, unit, and year that I have taught.  I've got folders for projects, warm-ups, and anything else you can imagine Prior to mass storage like this, I used a 1 inch binder for every unit in e...

I love this time of year.  Planning for the new school year is in full swing and you get a fresh start.  No matter what has happened in the past, you get a brand new group of students and you can do anything, change anything, keep anything.  You can build a better classroom every year. This year, that main thing that I am going to start is student reflection after each station (twice per day) in my hybrid classroom.  The reason that I'd like to do this is to prevent kids from just going through the motions.  Often I feel like my students don't metacognate about their learning.  I want to them to really think about what they have learned and what they have done and accomplished.  I may do this less often as the year progresses, maybe once per day or once per rotation after I know that students have started to become more reflective. The thing that I am going to stop doing is more like something that I am going to modify.  I love sta...

I spent most of my summer taking two grade classes to earn a PDE endorsement in Online Learning.  However, during the time that I had free, I found time to work on my courses for this coming school year. First, to help with student self reflection, I created this document .  The document will be used at the end of each station in my hybrid classroom .  Students will also reflect on the work that they do outside of class.  I want students to track the resources they used when stuck as well as reflect on how well they understood the assignment.  I will be using this tool as a replacement for grading classwork and homework for completion.  I will spot check student work occasionally, but for the most part it will be largely self reported.  This assignment will be worth 5% of students' overall grade. I also reevaluated how I would weight grades for  my class.  85% of the grade will be standards based .  These grades will come ...

I recently posted my algebra 2 scope and sequence.  I am also teaching geometry this year, so I figure I might as well post that too.  I am using standards based grading.  I number my objects as #.#  The first number is the unit number and the second number is the objective number within that unit.  The first year I did this, I just numbered from about 1 to 120.  It made making changes to the list more difficult.  Now when I need to add or subtract a topic, I don't need to renumber all of the objectives, just the ones in the same unit. I would love feedback on this list.  Our students take geometry after algebra 1 and 2.  The course seems very easy and I feel like I need more rigour in the class.  Please share your list on your blog and leave a comment here so I can check it out. Geometry Part 1 Chapter 1: Tools of Geometry 1.1 Use basic geometry terms and notation including points, lines and planes 1.2 Use basic postulat...

Oh how I wish I could be seriously planning for my first few days of classes.  I just got summoned to district jury duty.  This will be the fourth time that I have had jury duty.  Last year, I actually got called to local court twice in five months.  I was not all that worried about the second call because I know I was excused for a year.  When I called to let them know that I had just served, the lady on the phone was surprised to find that my name was in the pool three times.  I'm under the impression she fixed that, but who knows.  I wrote to the court to request a postponement until next summer.  At the very least, any time that is not during the first few days of school.  I certainly don't want to leave a substitute in charge of building a classroom culture for me during those very important first few days of class. I also have a jam packed curriculum, especially in algebra 2.  This past year, I messed up with pacing and had ...

Julie at I Speak Math  has been kind enough to organize a group of algebra 2 teachers on twitter.  You are welcome to join us by posting to the hashtag and blogging once per month or so about your algebra 2 class.  It was recommended that our first post consist of our scope and sequence so that we can determine which teachers might be teaching similar topics at the same time.  Hopefully this will aide in collaboration.  I am using standards based grading.  I number my objects as #.#  The first number is the unit number and the second number is the objective number within that unit.  The first year I did this, I just numbered from about 1 to 130.  It made making changes to the list more difficult.  Now when I need to add or subtract a topic, I don't need to renumber all of the objectives, just the ones in the same unit. Here is my list.  Notice the complete absence of probability, data analysis and matrices :(  I do need ...

Recently, I had a short twitter conversation with a teacher about eliminating formal review days before tests.  I responded that I no longer give traditional unit tests, so I also no longer do traditional review days. Instead, I give a cumulative quiz once every 4-6 school days.  These quizzes are heavy on recently learned material and light on content that was taught longer ago.  I use a form of standards based grading, so I use my gradebook every week to decide which older topics my kids need extra help with.  Those become the items added to what would otherwise be a traditional quiz.  You can read more about how I implemented standards based grading if you like. Since I also use hybrid learning, I then work a review of the older topics into my stations.  During small group instruction, I check in with students about new material and we usually practice on individual whiteboards.  I mix in a few of the targeted review content as well....

One important part of standards based grading for me is student responsibility.  I require students to track their progress.  I also track their progress in the gradebook of course, but I like my students to do this as well. For my own tracking, I just grade the weekly quizzes and replace higher grades for lower ones.  I don't keep track of progress over time, just the best performance.  I mentioned in my last post that students individualize there quizzes on their own by choosing which questions to answer and which questions to skip.   Here is an example of a page from a student tracking sheet.   This past year I had students give themselves one sticker when they reached the mastery level M and a second sticker when they reached the mastery level E.  I wrote about the mastery levels here.  One change that I am considering for next year is the possibility of using colored pencils instead of stickers and having ...

 One of the most common questions that I get about standards based grading is how I do individualized assessments.  What I do is give each kid the same really long assessment and then they individualize it on their own by choosing which questions to answer and which ones to skip.  My next post will be about how my students and I track their progress, but basically the kids know which objectives they have and have not mastered so they answer only the quiz questions that they have not mastered yet.  This method saves me the overwhelming amount of work it would be to create 150 individualized quizzes every week on my own. So here is what I do in more detail.  In an earlier post I wrote about how to create your objectives list .  I make a test bank in a separate document for every objective.  In each bank, I write 10-20 questions that measure the particular objective.  I make odd numbered items easier and even numbered items harder.  ...