Another blogpost about takeaways from TMC17 which I may be able to use in my classroom.

Marbleslides Challenges

I love Sean Sweeney. He’s everything good in the world, packaged in humanoid form! He’s so welcoming and kind to everyone… he wants everyone to feel part of things. At the Desmos Fellowship, he was the person I felt most safe saying “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing” and he would hunker down and help. I think many others felt the same. Okay, enough of the love fest. I am going to share his my favorite which I desperately want to use in my classroom. First, a little note. There is a difference between reading something on a blog and experiencing it. More and more, I’m recognizing that. I think if I read about this, I’d think “cool story, bro” and be like “okay, I could do this, but is it really worth it?” But experiencing it like we did during his short presentation, it’s like “I MUST DO!”

Sean has made a number of Desmos marbleslide challenges (if you don’t know about this, google it). Here’s a gif from his blog. The idea is that the marbles drop and you have to create stuff on Desmos to make the marbles hit the stars.

He shared one with us, and everyone in the giant room got obsessed with drawing functions that would let us “win.” For our challenge, people used ellipses, used lines, used piecewise functions, use quartics. It was inspired to see all the different approaches, and all the play that resulted.

What was lovely about Sean’s facilitation is that he paused us after a while (note: a teacher trick is to say “I’m going to pause your screens in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…”). You knew from the cacophony of groans that we were in a good place. Then he shared out different approaches. The diversity of “answers” for the challenge was fascinating.

He made this a regular thing in his classes. I love his poster which shows the diversity of responses:

So how can I use this? I’m not sure yet. I need a way to keep it light and fun, but also with all that my kids have on their plates and their lack of time, I don’t know if they would take the time to do it without some incentive. After teaching kids how to restrict the domain of a function/relation, and reminding them of all they have at their disposal that they’ve learned about (trig, circles, lines, parabolas, step functions, etc.), maybe I need to have a 10 to 15-minute in-class challenge (with kids working in pairs, so they are comfortable). And then do it again two weeks later, in class (but not in pairs). And then… announce that we are going to have regular marbleslides challenges. And the winner(s) will get the bonus question on the next assessment without having to do it. Or maybe buy some cheap plastic trophies which get displayed proudly in class? I want kids to work on the marbleslide challenges outside of class because part of this for me is that I want kids who might be slower at processing or coming up with ideas to have the time to execute their vision. I don’t want this to be a timed thing. Though maybe each time I introduce a new challenge, I give everyone 5 minutes in class to work on it.

What I have to make sure to do is share publicly the diversity of answers, like Sean did with his posters.

I also had an idea about how to score it. Something like 1 point for each star. But maybe if we’re learning about conics, or tangent, or something else, I’d give a bonus point for using those functions. And maybe an additional possible bonus point or two for any additional creativity (teacher’s choice)?

Sean’s posts are here and here.

SQUIGLES

David Butler also presented a my favorite on squigles. The poster and his blogpost are here.

I am not one for acronyms, really. They often are forced. But what I like is that these are used to teach student math helpers how to work with other students. From David’s post:

SQWIGLES is an acronym that we use to help our staff (and ourselves) when teaching in the MLC Drop-In Centre. It is a list of eight actions we can do to help make sure our interaction has a better outcome and make it more likely students will learn to be more independent.

It was originally Nicholas’ idea to have something like this. He wanted something to help the staff choose what to do in the moment, and also to help them reflect on their actions and choose ways to improve. We noticed that our staff (and ourselves) needed something focused on actions rather than philosophies, because then it could be used on the fly to choose what to do. Telling staff they need to be “encouraging” or “socratic” is not all that helpful when they don’t know how to put it into action. Yet this is what many documents giving advice to tutors do. So we decided to focus on the actions instead.

The reason I wanted to blog about this is because I think it might be helpful to share with the student tutors at my school. We have a peer tutoring program called TEACH (probably an acronym, since I always see it written in upper case… but for what, who knows!). And I haven’t inquired if and how students get trained. But I’d love to do a short 10 minute presentation on this, and maybe do a few scenarios where kids can practice tutoring while other kids watch (fishbowl?) and take notes on which of SQUIGLES happened. (Not all need to happen! Just look for them.)

I think I should also have this on my desk, since I work with students one-on-one a lot and having that reminder can’t hurt!

Porfolios

I went to Cal Armstrong’s session on documenting student learning. Over the years, I keep on getting inspired to have kids make portfolios that they turn in to show evidence of different traits. And this came up again in that session. James Cleveland has done it. Tina Cardone has done it. I want to do it. But aaaah! The time to make it into a reality! Argh! But I really would love to make explicit some values — maybe not standards of mathematical practice (… or maybe throw of a few of them in there…), but things like perseverance or active listening or seeing a problem in a different way or acting with courage or helping someone understand something by asking good questions or recognizing your own a misunderstanding or changing for the positive as a group member in someway. And have kids document these moments or interactions. And then at the end of a quarter, turn them in. (But have a check in halfway through the quarter!) It would mean that they are looking for these things, looking to do these things. And recognizing that I value these things. Maybe they have a choice of things they can include — not all of them? Maybe they can take videos or photographs or write paragraphs or draw a comic — it can open-ended how they demonstrated this quality or action.

There is something that I think happens in my school. Kids form facebook groups (or maybe on some other kind of social media) for their classes, and I suspect lots of backchannel communication about the class happens on this group. I suspect a lot of it is positive and uplifting and helpful. I would love to encourage kids to submit that sort of stuff in their portfolio also, if it demonstrates whatever qualities were asked for!

I don’t know if I’m going to do this this year. But maaaaaybe?

Preview, not Review: Student Intervention

Kat Glass gave a my favorite on intervention with students who were failing. Part of it was a powerful and important note about language and using code-words instead of saying what you mean. We don’t have many kids that fail classes in my school. But one thing that did strike home was that sometimes when working with kids who are struggling, we put all our emphasis on remediation and it’s like we’re always playing catch up. But sometimes we need to remember that with a struggling student, one tack that we can’t overlook is previewing upcoming material. It can help kids be more engaged and confident in class, and it sets a good tone moving forward.

I do this sometimes, but I need to remember to do this more frequently. Although I do lots of discovery based work, I don’t think that previewing some of it with a kid, and working through some of the discovery with them one-on-one, and then them seeing some of it happen again in class is a bad thing. I’ll just have to remind them that they need to be careful about not letting other kids have the same insights they had — and their role is to help without telling.