New Semester Resolution #2: Never (Always) Ignore Student Responses

Do you ever feel like you must have fallen asleep at the wrong time during PD or way back at the university?

"Listen to your students," sounds like such great advice for a principal or instructor to give to any young or pre-service teacher, but sometimes its just as important to silence a voice so another can rise.

He looks so eager, right?

Listen to Your Students

Do you have any procedures in place for getting feedback from your students? I do this sporadically as exit slips every couple weeks on any given lesson or topic, but I always do it to begin and end a semester with a survey.

The initial survey is to get info on my students' learning styles and teacher history, and the exit survey is for feedback on how they learned, what they liked, what they didn't, what might be helpful to tweak, etc. Some of my exit survey responses are funny - "He dresses well," - some of it is mean - "can't ever teach" - but most of it confirms attitudes I already have heard from my students, and some of it comes as a helpful surprise (the first time I considered superfluous technology use may have impeded a student's learning).

When a couple students out of ninety say something similar, I often attribute those to outliers or students with an ax to grind, but if I see it over and over, it builds validity. Giving this feedback opportunity to my students is helpful in several ways:

1. I get favor collateral from many students because they know I'm trying to improve
2. Frustrated students can get things off their chests and start clean in January
3. I can model humility to my students (it takes some to even put yourself out there)
4. I get a window into my teaching that does not usually come out when other teachers are in the room or during walk-through or formal observations. (Contents of this past semester's survey mostly led to these new semester resolutions)

Ignore Your Students (So You Can Hear From Others)

As I alluded to earlier, this would have come as a surprise to student-teacher Chuck, but sometimes kids wanting to answer questions can be bad for my lessons. I'm sure you've see it too, but the rate at which I let the A/B kid answer and ask every question is often directly related to the number of eyes I see rolling or kids that check out and start doing anything besides math. I notices this fairly early on last semester with a particular student. 

This was the sequence of my responses:

For elementary teachers, the stick can is well, elementary, but I don't find it common place in secondary classrooms. For me, I probably never bothered to even try because we have so many more students. No part of me wants to keep track of 90 sticks and/or 5 different cans. Using the Stick Pick app makes your "can" MUCH easier to manage. The added benefit with the app is that you can set it to give you different Bloom's prompts for different students, allowing you to differentiate on the fly.

Conclusion

Finding methods to generate and receive feedback from every student that work for you is the bottom line. Its easy to pat yourself on the back when a couple students demonstrate mastery, but should it come at the expense of the large group that were almost there?

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

New Semester Resolution #1: Innovate Like Its 1992 (or, Do Your Students Still Make Graphs By Hand?)

1. Raise your hand if your students love making graphs by hand.
2. Keep your hand up if all of your students are proficient at producing graphs of equations (especially anything past linear functions)

Still have your hand up? Okay... Maybe this post isn't for you. Just kidding - universal appeal here. Several years ago I picked up the 1992 NCTM Yearbook at a massive used book sale held yearly in St. Louis. Every archived article in this yearbook was concentrated on using the power of calculator technology to enhance students' understanding of numbers, operations, and functions, and moving instruction beyond simply replicating graphs. Yearly we have conversations in my Algebra 2 PLC over how we're going to get our kids graphing quadratics and describing transformations of the accompanying graphs and equations.

As you may have also experienced, students often get caught up in making the graphs and sometimes never even make it to the transformations (which puts a wrench in the cogs of your lesson). Do your state standards say anything about students constructing graphs by hand from tables? Do the CCSS imply any graphing by hand? (In fact, Mathematical Practice Standard #5, Use appropriate tools strategically specifically expects that students will use technology for their graphing.)

Graphing by hand - right up there with top hats, saloons, and spitoons.

Being able to sketch a graph after using a graphing calculator or spreadsheet program is different work than what my students usually do with functions. Using technology to grab a graph and then use it in modeling doesn't eliminate necessity of my students' knowledge of the graphing, and it probably demands more.

When my students graph by hand, I usually...

• Pick "easy" equations that have as many integers as possible in the features
• Use "small" numbers
• Don't require students to manipulate the scales on their axes.
• May or may not know who actually has an understanding of "rate of change" on that function they just graphed beyond the fact that they used "rise-over-run"

When we use technology to generate graphs, students must...

• Trace graphs to find features (intercepts, zeros, maxima, minima)
• Have an awareness of the domain and range the want for their function ("I didn't get anything on my graph when a put in the equation")
• Know the scale of their axes in order to judge reasonableness of their graph to the situation they are attempting to model (A strangely high/low y-intercept of a linear function over time when students input "1999" instead of years after *)

So why do we still so often require that students are able to construct graphs by hand? Is it a filter for straining the "good" students from the "poor"? Is it "good to know?" I don't know that many people could legitimately give me a case for the necessity of a student being able to make a graph by hand without any assistance from a calculator, software, or web-based utility, like the Desmos calculator (of which I recently blogged about if you didn't catch it.).

More than TWENTY YEARS later... we're still having this discussion. In fact, one of my favorite Google+/Twitter follows, +David Wees also blogged about it earlier this year and made some valid points in favor and opposition. Is one barrier to education reform/relevance that we're holding onto too many they-should-know-this-because-we-did skills in our curricula? Will this be the year you finally give in to technology's relentless march? :)

It will take some editing of my assessments, but I am going to allow (and encourage) my students to use technology to graph EVERY instance it arises this coming semester.

Are you ready for 1992? I encourage you to join me in this challenge!