Using QFT to prepare students for new experiences

I first learned about Question Formulation Technique (QFT) when I attended the Exeter conference in the summer of 2015 and then was re-introduced to it at the Knowles fall meeting 2015.  QFT is a process that encourages students to ask many questions, categorize the questions, improve the questions, and then rank the importance of these questions.  QFT was developed in the medical field to help patients ask better questions, however since questions are valuable in many contexts, QFT has been modified for many different contexts.  

I have struggled to find a way to incorporate QFT into my teaching routines especially when the learning targets for a specific day in my geometry classroom are so specific - there is just not a lot of room for a wide open exploration of ideas.  However, in my computer science classroom, part of the goals each day is to increase student interest in the topic matter.  When an opportunity came along to have students visit Target HQ in Minneapolis to work with the engineers and scientists there in their technologies departments, I needed a way to get students ready to engage with these engineers.  Enter QFT.

For a starting point for students, I put together a short paragraph of text from e-mails I had exchanged with my partner at Target as well as snippets from his team members’ LinkedIn profiles.   Students were given 5 minutes to read the paragraph of text and then 2 minutes to summarize what they read or pull out key pieces of information in that text.  From there students were put into groups of 4 students and then were given 12 minutes to generate questions.  12 FULL minutes.  One person documented these questions in a google doc while (in small groups) while their team continued to ask questions.  While some of these questions got off task in unproductive ways, other questions showed how students were making connections to the work Target was doing and their own learning or lives.  

At the end of this time we discussed the difference between open ended and closed questions and students color-coded their questions based on these two distinctions and changed two of their closed questions to be open-ended.  Finally they prioritized their questions to determine what their top 3 questions were and I sent the list of questions to my partner at Target to help him understand what my students were already thinking about before the trip.

At the field trip, students met 5 individuals who worked in different roles related to technology in Target stores.  These people shared their paths to where they were (from planning on being a pilot to a nurse, etc.) and why they like their job that they have now.  Then students broke up into two groups and saw new technologies Target was using (or hoping to use) in their stores to improve the guest experiences.  At the end of the time, students engaged in a short brainstorming activity with the Target engineers who used the student ideas to generate more ideas.  While the experience was fast, because we had gone through the QFT process before the trip, students were ready to hear what the engineers were sharing and students were ready to ask questions throughout the experience.

While I know funds and enthusiasm for field trips is limited, I do see a few opportunities to use QFT in my classroom in the future.

1. In preparation for any guest speaker.  Guest speakers can be a very valuable part of a course and this is especially true in my computer science class where I am trying to get students to see the many different options a career in technology has to offer.  While I do my best to prep guest speakers, I should also prep my students as much as possible.  Furthermore, it can be difficult to know exactly what points the speakers are going to want to touch on more than others.  By preparing students, students can contribute more to the presentation and perhaps guide it with their questions.  With Target, I shared the questions ahead of time with the presenters but in the future, I don’t know if that is necessary or if it takes away some of the authenticity of the experience.
2. Last time I struggled with finding a “data source” for these questions to be generated from.  The paragraph from e-mails I pieced together was a good start.  However, the data source was a bit contrived since I picked what information was shared with students.  I think I could have students look at other data sources more broadly.  For example, I could have students look at a company’s website to generate questions or view a guest speaker’s LinkedIn profile.  Since websites and social media are something that students are accustomed to consuming, so generating questions around these data sources may be a good practice for students to build.

Data isn't so bad after all!

I'll be honest, I wasn't looking forward to the data unit.  Students generally don't take computer science to learn or think about data.  Honestly, a lot of the material felt pretty common sense-y.  I wanted it to be more math-y.  I wanted students to have more skills to create visualizations that were more impressive.  I wanted to make it more focused on social justice.  But, I went with it... surprisingly, it turned out well!

First of all common sense, is never very common.  By the end of this unit, I came to understand that the real learning was about being a critical viewer of data.  My goal for this unit is to build student capacity to generate knowledge from data but also question how visualizations or data collection might have a bias.  This unit certainly provided ample opportunities to build those student skills.

I was able to bring in a lot of real life articles and have a short discussion about them in class.  One of my favorites was about non-voters which as super relevant to the content for the following reasons:

• It told an excellent story and used visualizations to support the story.  
• It used a variety of visualizations (Bar charts, pie graphs, stacked bar graphs)...
• It showed how different visualizations could be used to lead to different recommendations
• The data collection methods and "cleaning" of data was similar to how we cleaned our own in-class data (free-response and then categorized). 

In reality, I think I could have used this as an example of what students could do for our final project in the unit - use several different visualizations to tell your story.

As I graded student work it was clear that next year I need to do more with "story" development.  I should use different articles that tell a story with data and have students read/analyze those.

Additionally, there is still a lot of opportunity for sense-making.  Several projects have severe gaps in sense making.  For example, they made a chart, but it isn't clear what the data actually is about.  I could even do a whole lesson on "naming charts" since a lot of students left of titles or had titles that didn't make sense.  I could give them a bunch of title-less charts and have them come up with the names.

Finally, I tweaked the original project to allow students to explore other data sets that they felt were interesting and relevant to their interests.  I actually had most students take this option which was exciting.  It helped bring out student personalities and also gave them a glimpse into big data - some data sets were QUITE large!  Overall, it turned out well, and I am thinking about how to improve upon it for next year.

For next year, I am still fooling around with these ideas:

• Making it more social justice focused - this is always a goal of mine in math, it seems like here is a great place to do it too.
• Talk more about the use of story in data
• Make more interactive visualizations either with programming or with Google fusion tables
• This would take more programming experience or we would want to walk through one together as a class in google fusion tables before setting students free.
• I could move this to the end of the year and do more in-depth applications if there is time
• Tie this into big data with Kaggle.com's data sets - it actually has a lot of great resources to use!

Wait... is that a learned skill?! Student Share-outs

When a manager or colleague asks me to share out something I am working on, I am able to determine the following:

• What is important to the audience that I need to share
• What is important to me that I want to get across
• What information is helpful and what information is not

What I learned last year (and am re-learning this year) is that knowing this is a learned skill.  I asked students to share out their projects about telling a story with data.  It was amazing to see how many blank stares I was getting.

Students seem to be so used to having a rubric or pseduo-script for presentations that this idea of casually sharing out their learning was not something most students were able to do. 

Ultimately I gave them this (below) guide.  I stressed that this was just the three most important things I thought they should talk about, but it might be different for their project.  It was interesting to see which students stood at the front and answered each question out loud and which ones were able to pull out the big ideas themselves.  

Here is what students were given:

Your presentation should...

Tell us about your data:

• What data did you choose?
• Why did you choose it?
• What was difficult about finding, choosing, or working with your data?

Tell us about the process:

• What did you expect to find?
• What was your process to explore your data?  What different things did you try?  Did you filter your data, use a pivot table, try different visualizations, etc?

Tell the story:

• What story does your data tell?
• What questions does this raise for you?
• What other data would be helpful in telling your story or answering your questions?
• Why is this important/interesting to you?

Defining what participation looks like in a Harkness Classroom

As mentioned before, to make Harkness work, I need students to really be able to understand their role in the classroom.  

I had students read a list of ways they should be participating in class during this time also from Dr. Sauer.  The list is long.  So, after reading the list, I focused on just one of the bullet points.  Specifically, "ask questions".  Together we brainstormed what "asking questions" should look like/sound like.   This next part was really important.  I told students I would be looking for them to ask each other questions each day and would take note of who asked questions.  This would be put into the gradebook as points.   This is a lot like the "participation quizzes" I saw at a KSTF meeting once.  Even though students were at times sarcastically asking one another questions in class just to get the points, it totally worked!   They were ALL about asking each other questions - especially as I got near a group.   I tried to assign competence to students who were authentically asking strong questions. 

Throughout the week, we took a look at a few of the other ways they should participate and discussed what that should look like and sound like.  Over the course of the week, we talked about 1) asking questions, 2) check that others in the group understand the solution, and 3) summarize, clarify, or restate progress made on a particular exercise.  Again, every day I explicitly said I would be looking for these three ways of participating and documenting it.  This held students accountable to the norms in a more visible way for myself and for students. 

This first week, I was the one who re-capped the day and went through specific exercises with the class.  I told them I expected them to make notes on their exercises.  I think I could make this more productive by doing 2 things:

1. Getting a different colored pen for students to make these notes with so it was clear what is new, added information, and what is old.
2. Moving to having students do the majority of the presenting.

Overall, I really think this discussion and structure for participation was what made the class more successful this second time around. 

Harkness Attempt... Take 2 - Learning from observations

At the beginning of the year, I tried using a Harkness method of instruction with one of my math classes.  It is a class with students who have traditionally struggled with math and I knew a lot of them from previous classes.   I blogged about my first attempt here a bit... it didn't go so hot.

I abandoned it and planned on going to observe a teacher in AZ who uses this method exclusively with their students.

At first I thought my students didn't know how to collaborate - I was wrong though.  When I gave them a quiz and then mid-quiz told students they could work with their team, students had a fantastic conversation with one another.  SO... they knew how to talk about math... they just needed a bit more skin in the game.

While in AZ, I observed how a teacher ran their classroom.  I don't know how to put this in a narrative format, so, in no particular order, here's what I learned:

• I don't need to give students time to work on the problems ahead of time - and students don't NEED to do homework.  The teachers I saw gave students 2-3 problems for homework and then discussed them (and maybe a few others) in class the next day.  It seemed do-able.  My group of students is not the best at doing homework, so I was worried that if doing homework was REQUIRED for using harkness, this would not be possible for my students.  Observing gave me hope that this was not necessary.  Don't get me wrong, having students do the work ahead of time would make the material stick with students more.
• I still needed to build discussion norms with students.  At the school I observed, EVERY class was discussion based.  Students were expected to lead discussions more than I think my students ever had been asked to.  So, while the school I observed was philosophically aligned with discussion based learning across content areas, my students would not have the same background in discussion based learning.  This also motivated me to get into some English classrooms to get to see what discussions emerge in other classes and how they are framed/scaffolded. 
• Problems build slowly but also widely.  In this school I saw problems in one class hour that I normally wouldn't see in the same unit or even same year in a traditional curriculum.  I totally get the benefit of this AND perhaps if we did more of this we wouldn't end up re-teaching linear equations, slopes, quadratics, SohCahToa, OVER and OVER again each year.
• There is an ebb and flow to the class.  The teacher would bring the class together to clarify something for the group, making sure everyone was focused on him/her for a bit, and then give students a clear "now with this information, go do _______".  This helped re-focus the class when needed.

Alright.  So, I observed.  I thought about how I was going to apply this in my classroom.  After 2 weeks of processing all of this I rolled it out in my classroom. 

Learning from last time and knowing that I needed students to think differently about learning - maybe even radically differently about learning,  I had students read an article that Dr. Jonothon Sauer gave me about how we learn.  It was actually a hugely helpful way to start off.  Students were confused as to why we were reading in math.  I think shocking them a bit out of their comfort zone with this article helped set a tone for a "new era".  That being said, the discussion we had was equally as important.  When I asked students to summarize the article... some of their summaries were inaccurate at best.  In fact, some of what they supposedly "got" from the article was downright wrong.   I am planning on going back to this article in a few weeks to re-read and process it together. 

From there we talked about how participation should look. 

Teaching Programming

We are coming to the end of our first mini-programming unit.

• Don't let students get too far ahead.  Another teacher gave me this advice.  Letting students work ahead just makes the gap between students' knowledge greater.  Despite my best attempts to keep students together, I just am struggling to do that.  Students will come in to class and say, I did all of the unit last night at home.  In part, I am excited that they are loving the work... BUT that just crates a big problem for me as a teacher.  Which, I know is selfish.  I think I need to be more explicit about why I want them to work together or not work ahead.  I also might start out the unit with some pair programming.  I anticipate some complaints from students, but... we will see how it works.  Especially since the second unit is much longer and without as many hard stops - I need to have a plan to control student work flow. 
• For students who finish early, I am having students choose from the following:
• CSS or HTML in codecademy.com - this is the most user friendly option for students
• A student showed me http://projecteuler.net/ which has a few different problems that students can think through
• Start working through CS50
• Look into the Nature of Code and do problems from there (for students who have physics experiences)
• Processing/p5
• I feel like some students who know enough programming just don't get that excited about the visual pieces of programming. For these students, I am thinking of having them do CS50.  To me, CS50 requires a lot more scaffolding for most students, but I am hoping that these students can handle it.
• I know I am going to finish this curriculum early which means I will have lots of extra time... SO... I am going to have to make some adjustments.  I am thinking about doing a web development extension for students in addition to doing the arduino programming.

Encoding Data - With interactive notebooks!

I think it's official, Unit 2 (chapter 1) is maybe my favorite part of code.org's AP CSP curriculum!

I cannot imagine a better way to get students actually excited to compress text than with their text compression widget!  Students would have done that all week had I let them!

I also love the favicon project that students do at the end of the chapter.  I used padlet to show the students' work as they finished and to let other hours see what they were doing.  That strategy worked really well since students put a lot more work/creativity into their projects when they saw others' work and knew it was going to be displayed.  You can find the padlet link here.  I am hoping I can print these out and make a quilt of sorts to display in class.  I just need to find time to do that.  Overall, I am really happy with the level of creativity students had - sometimes I feel like the down side of teaching rule followers is that they don't know how to think outside the box, but after seeing this, I am REALLY excited to see what they do during programming.

This unit I also continued my trend with interactive notebooks.   I've gotta say that these were lower on the "interactive" side of things BUT I think doing these is helping students document their learning.

Here is my pages from this unit.

Here is the table of contents - thanks to Sarah Hagen!

I wish I could have put all my number systems items together in the notebook but students weren't ready to hear about hex until now.  They all follow the same set-up with the hopes of showing students that different base number systems are not scary.

The two above go together - this is probably the most important page.  I should have probably talked about abstraction here too... next year! 

A little mnemonic device for remembering file sizes.  Students were a little grossed out about Billy Bob.

We recapped talking about pictures here... I honestly would love to maybe do one more page where they practice identifying colors and hex.  I don't think that will be a huge part of the AP exam but it definitely shows their understanding of the concept.

AND... sometimes you just need a page to throw in those "extras" - I tried relating it back to the code.org videos where ever possible.  I should probably give examples on this page too. Otherwise, all of this information is from EKs in the curriculum framework.

Since I believe that sharing is caring, you can find all the google docs in this file. 

I surveyed students on their thoughts about interactive notebooks and got mostly positive results - about 20% are kinda disinterested in them after our first unit, I am hoping that for the AP test they are going to be more enthusiastic about them.

Here is what I asked them:

Here are the results... they go in order of the questions asked above.

I will take those results.  I think the real test will come in May to determine how helpful these notes were.

Next I am skipping ahead to Unit 3 - Intro to programming.  I have NO idea what those pages will look like.  I might use some vocabulary pages or maybe do some examples with reading code examples.  I think for the programming unit, daily reflections might be more important than the notes I actually give students since we are building skills more than we are building an "information knowledge" base.

Go big or go home: Interactive Notebooks - EVERYWHERE!

This year I decided to do interactive notebooks in every. class.

Neither of my classes have textbooks this year so we are making our own.  For my Advanced Algebra class, I have been relying a ton on the one and only Sarah Hagen.

For my AP CSP class, I had a little more work that I needed to do.  Our first unit is on the Internet which has a lot of vocabulary that is new to students.  This is what our first few pages look like...

I put in a mini-syllabus where we wrote in the norms we developed as a class together. 

Obviously a contents page - borrowed from Sarah Hagen.  I also put in these "Big Idea Connection" pages for students to write a reflection each day.  I haven't graded those yet, but they were inspired by some really cool work by Sophie State's AP Bio class.  I am excited to see what those look like in the next week.  We will add 2-3 more pages to this unit in addition to what is shown here.

The famed Flippy-Do and a note about the binary number system.  Originally I was going to do 3 pages on number systems but my students really seemed to understand it so I thought that felt like over-kill.

A little foldable about the physical internet.  It is essentially a foldable with pros/cons inside. 

Sometimes notes are boring... that's ok.  This for IP addresses, nothing else made sense. 

 This one I was trying to do an "egg" like drawing but boxes were easier.  A student said he could help me out with the egg though so we will see what changes.  Ideally I would have had students use colored pencils to emphasize the different layers around TCP. 

We will be doing HTTP tomorrow... but so far this is what we've got on this page. Pretty straight forward.

I am loving the notebooks - it gives us more freedom to focus on creativity and discovery in class and then take a day to synthesize everything.  I also know EVERY student is getting this information in the end.  Ideally this will become a key resources for students as they prepare for the AP test in May. 

Informal reviews from students is mixed.  Some feel like using glue sticks is below them, others have said they LOVE using glue sticks.  I am hoping to more formally survey students after our first assessment so get their thoughts.  

The internet unit is the most "information" heavy of all the topics, so I don't really know how I will be continuing to implement these in some of the more "doing" heavy topics like programming.  For those units it might be more about vocabulary that pops up or a place for them to sketch their concepts and show that they are brainstorming ideas for projects.  

I am also doing these in my Advanced Algebra class which is a totally different story in SO many ways.  I will certainly be updating this blog with developments on that class as well. 

Self Care in Teaching

This year my goal was to practice more self-care throughout the year.  I feel like during summer I get to do everything I love and feel really free, and then the school year comes and by the end of the year I feel like a shell of a human.  That's not ok.

So, (enter) self-care.  This meant:

• Going to bed at a reasonable time.  I start going to bed at 9 in hopes of being in bed by 10.  That gets me 7 hours of sleep which seems reasonable.
• Don't give up on a work out each day.  I enjoy going to the gym and getting my sweat-on and it is an excellent de-stressor.  I always have time for a workout. 
• Practice Mindfulness More.  The more research I see on Mindfulness the more I am convinced it is essential to a healthy life.  Additionally, THIS article says it is good for my students too so this is a 2-for-1 and who doesn't love a 2-4-1 deal!?
• Be social DURING the week.  That's right, fun can happen during the week too.  I made a goal to do something social at least one day a week.  This has been a little more difficult for me to follow through on since it relies on other people to also be dedicated to this, but I am still going to work towards that goal.

With that, I wonder what other teachers do to practice self-care during the year?  

Week 2 - Still getting the feel of the group

This is my second full week of teaching my Advanced Algebra class.  The first week I (tried) using exclusively Harkness style of teaching.  It didn't go well.  I also tried being really explicit with content in interactive notebooks.  Students were insulted that I thought they didn't know order of operations... however, when it came to practicing, many mistakes were made by students.

SO, this week I decided to move on.  I am not leaving Harkness behind or problem solving behind, but I needed to give students some thing that they felt was more worth their time.  This is what it looked like.

1. We did the "How much money have I spent at Target" problem based on how much I have "saved" with 5% off with the red card.  It was a good discussion and helped continue what we did last week with solving problems with proportions.  We took the whole hour to sort it out.  At the end of class, I gave some students the option to estimate how much I WILL spend at target this whole year and several students took me up on that option.  I've gotta say, I love this problem - it is real-world and students get into it more.
   
2. From there we started a new unit on functions.  I was going to do the definition of a function after doing the Desmos Polygraph task on functions.  BUT while students were playing the game, a TON of vocabulary came out.  Watching students play the game made me realize my students know a little about a lot of math.  When I assume we need to start at square one, they get frustrated and shut down.  SO, my new strategy is to move forward with linear functions and fill in the gaps as needed.  When a student doesn't know something, we will cover it "just in time".  I am hoping this will make students feel more respected intellectual beings. 
3. The last few days this week I told students about my own "a-ha" moment.  I mentioned that we are going to continue doing problems together for the next few weeks and then start quadratics.  I gave students some of Johnothon Sauer's problems to do.   Here was one of them:
4. 
   Watching students work on this was interesting, many students read "Fill in the table to the right with a value for x and y" and then just wrote in random numbers in the table.   SO... we clearly need to do some practice with reading directions and also understanding how x's and y's are related.   My goal is to alternate between doing some Desmos Activities and then do some "Partner Exercises" with some notebook additions and end-of-the-hour recaps. 

We will see how week 3 goes!

Week 1 - experiment with Harkness Teaching

This year I had the opportunity to teach a math class with out a PLC.  It is kinda exciting.  I decided that I am going to try the Harkness method of teaching where students workshop problems together all class hour - every class hour.  The problems are carefully scaffolded to allow them to be successful.  I was really encouraged by a presentation I saw at Exeter from Johnothon Sauer and finally got the courage to do it this year.

I did a fair amount of norm building before hand and talked about expectations.  But WHOA, has it been rough.  I am getting silence from students across the board.  Even when I ask them to turn to their partner and talk... I get nothing.  I don't know if I need to give sentence starters but this communication should be authentic.  I don't even think the content is really the problem, yet.  This is all stuff students have seen before (intentionally) since I wanted to focus on the communication - NOT the content.  But right now neither are happening.

HOWEVER, I did have one win last week.  A student was working on a problem and they asked me about a previous problem that we had done the day prior.  This was significant because it meant that at least ONE student was thinking about connections and seeing similarities.   This tells me that the problems and philosophy are solid.  I just need to break down this communication barrier between students.

My new favorite question to ask students

I have discovered my new favorite question to ask students: "What problem do you want to solve?"

This year, I used Sara VanDerWerf's name tent idea in my computer science class.  I loved it!  It gave me a chance to get to know student names/faces AND some interesting things about them. Handing out name plates each day gave me additional opportunities to learn student names as well.  The last day of the name tents I asked students to answer the question "What problem do you want to solve?"

I got this idea from either NPR or the MTBoS (I cannot remember), but the philosophy behind it was that asking students "What do you want to be when you grow up?" isn't a great question since so many of the jobs available for them haven't been invented yet.  Additionally, students only know what jobs they see in their lives (thus why "teachers", "doctors", "lawyers", are frequent answers - they see these jobs in their lives or on TV).  HOWEVER, these big problems need to be solved, and those won't be going away anytime soon.

I was really surprised by their answers!  Check out some of them here:

I definitely wasn't giving my students enough credit for thinking big.  I had this assumption that a lot of these students were driven by grades, but they also were thinking of some really challenging things!

I also know we will be able to touch on how technology can help solve these problems throughout the course.  It might even lead to some neat final projects!  It's going to be a great year!