Strategies for Solving Linear Equations

Getting ALL of your students proficient at solving linear equations is the Holy Grail of any Algebra teacher. Just about every PLC team I've been on has attempted to re-tackle it as an (in-achievable?) SMART goal.

SMART goal setting season is upon us once again in these parts, and the early formative data from our Applied Math (after Geometry, before Algebra 2) students suggests that we MUST place an emphasis on solving equations with variables on both sides of the equation.

We're going to share the following strategies with our students:
Algebraic:

• have students draw line through equal sign
• distribute first to eliminate “( )”
• combine like terms on left, combine like terms on right
• eliminate the smaller coefficient term
• backwards order of operations
• write answer as “variable = number”

Verbal:

• write out algebraic steps/thinking in words

With Multiple Fractions:

• multiply every part by least common multiple of the denominator

Common enough, I know. What I'm really sharing with you is the posters I made to put up in our classroom. If you're going to do something you're feeling a little deja vu over, the least you can do is apply some of your creative juices to change your attitude. :) I made these images at PicMonkey using a combination of textures and text, and just used the Microsoft Picture Viewer on our PCs at school to print them on a full 8.5x11 sheet.

Data Doesn't Have to Be Scary - How You Get it Matters

Do you ever feel like you're left with a pile like this after you've collected data for a survey or given a common assessment that needs to be graded and entered into a spreadsheet?

Yeah, I Know Someone Like That...
Gathering data to use for your building goals, data teams, or class statistics projects doesn't have to end with you and/or your colleagues spending hours in front of a spreadsheet entering values (and inevitably making errors). This TED Talk from global health consultant and pediatrician Joel Selanikio (@jselanikio) chronicles his experience with paper surveys in the developing world. What Dr. Selanikio realized from his field observations was that no matter how many nurses tramped through jungles door-to-door surveying families on child births, immunizations, deaths, and the like, dealing with the data was a cumbersome, daunting task that usually was abandoned. The result was "data-driven" decision making on vaccine supply that was formed from very small, very incomplete datasets.




What's This Mean for Me as a Teacher?
Dr. Selanikio's story is about the success of cloud-based, user-friendly, digital data collection methods, and I think we can experience the same in our schools. Beyond the results your state sends weeks (months?) after your spring standardized testing, how much of the data you gather about the student learning at your school is ever compiled electronically?

I think a lot of the one-more-thing mentally that many teachers associate with data teams in their schools is the result of their experiences grading everything by hand, tallying the scores on paper or in their grading software, and THEN taking the scores and (hopefully) copying and pasting them into some common spreadsheet. So how can you experience a similar explosion of efficiency like observed in the TED Talk?

If it cannot be gathered electronically, don't collect the data.

The Shift

Only collecting data electronically MAY mean that you and your team have to rewrite some assessments, but that might be for the best, anyway. Which is more valuable, asking a student to graph the equation of a line in slope-intercept form, (which would be hard to enter on a spreadsheet) or having the student graph the equation of a line and then tell something about its slope, intercept, or coordinates? Once students are taking what they do graphically and making textual conclusions or inferences, those responses can easily be matched and manipulated in Excel.

What Ways Can I Gather Data Electronically in My Classroom?

The secret is in taking advantage of mobile devices that you and your students already have.

Try an of these on for size:

• Google Forms (Here's how I did it)
• Socrative (Here's how I did it)
• MagPi

5 Reasons Why Teaching Summer School is Good for Professional Development

I'm beginning my 6th edition of summer school for my district on Monday. My first summer, before we had children and my wife was still working, summer school was a means to cut my teeth in my own real-life math classroom before the fall semester began and stuff got real. 

Teaching summer school is more of a financial requirement for our family now, but there are still several things I enjoy about the summer session that I think make me a better teacher.

1. "Do your worst."

If you can handle what summer school students have to throw at you, you'll probably be prepared for the worst you may see during the regular session. Some summer school students are highly motivated (which is what I expected of all of them before my first summer), and they are a delight, but most in my district come to me with one or several of the following: immaturity, frustration, anger, dejection, ambivalence, complacency. I jumped over a table last summer in the midst of what was looked to be a fight brewing. It was awesome.

2. Try new things.

The thinking on this is that for most of these kids, whatever traditional activities you or a colleague tried during the spring or fall were not successful strategies, so repackaging the regular curriculum into a shorter chunk is asking for boredom at best, and more failure at worst. I feel less pressure to have my lessons or activities go perfectly during the summer because classes are smaller and we meet longer, so its more feasible to clarify directions and completely change course if necessary without sacrificing an entire day's 50 minute period.

I love piloting projects, games, and software in the summer.

3. Motivate, motivate, motivate.

This is for my students, too, but secretly maybe for me the most. :)

There aren't a ton of self-starting, goal-setting 16 and 17 year olds to begin with - you're definitely not going to find them in summer school. Teaching my summer students forces me to rethink why I teach, and what heights are possible for any of these students. 

Morning-grump-Chuck does not fly in summer session.

4. Make new connections with colleagues

Since my district consolidated summer school for our 3 high schools into one building 3 years ago, summer school has meant working more closely with teachers I only see on sporadic district PD days. Collaborating with these teachers during the summer has given me a clearer picture of what goes on across my district and helps me make sense of goals and vision given to us from administration across the street. Most of the trainings on this page were made possible by connections I made during summer school.

5. Prioritize and dump.

You know that practice where you teach some things during the regular school year "for exposure," just because its in your book, or you like that trick? 

Reteaching an entire semester's worth of content is obviously impossible, so the summer session requires refinement of the curriculum to essential topics and strategies. Fortunately for me, my district already has separate pacing guides for the summer, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel every summer.

This year, to cut costs, our district is holding only "credit recovery" courses, which the state allows for students who were close to passing. My class will be 2 weeks instead of the usual 4, so I'm forced to prioritize and predict where the biggest needs will be amongst my recovering students.

Why does this matter for the regular session? The topics we end up covering in summer school often become the subject of smart goals and data collection from common formative assessments in our PLCs.

Kickstart Your New Semester Resolutions With Unstuck

I found Unstuck as a genius recommendation in the iOS App Store in November and it helped me though a lot of frustration I was having over my students' (lack of and organization of) notes in their notebooks and folders.

Unstuck's purpose is very straightforward; to get you past your obstacles, unstuck, and back to productivity. Initial workflow is intuitive, but the further I got through the process, I felt a little lost in menus. It must take a lot of work to get unstuck, 'cause I felt like I was answering questions longer than I expected to. :)

Another strength of the app are the tangents you can follow like historical/contemporary figures who have been similarly stuck, tips for getting started, and several thought-organizing tools for you to work through if you are still not appropriately inspired. Here are my results:

I guess questions are good; this page told me a lot about myself.

To wrap up the story, going through my stuck moment did help me to clear the clutter. The lesson I took from my report was that I needed to be more clear in my intentions for note-taking, and less vague on what things I want me students to be focusing on. I went to an adapted Cornell Notes style (here's a great C-Notes in math class how-to from Blogger Druin) that I'd used with some success in the past, and several students responded very positively. At the very least, when looking at their notebook while offering help, I (and the student) could quickly flip back through their pages and sort through pages that were homework and those that were in-class notes because I had a clearer idea of what that page should look like in the notebook.

Everyone's a winner.

APPLICATION FOR YOUR CLASSROOM:

• New lesson ideas
• Problem solving for leadership teams, committees, PLC or data teams
• Goal setting for students
• Team/ community building
• Intervention strategy brainstorming

More resources:

Unstuck Community on Tumblr

Review: Getting Unstuck Now Has An App
Review: InsideFMM.com iPad Productivity App of the Year