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!

First day - Goal: Talk Less

The time has come for the start of the school year!

It took a while but my classroom is ready!

For my first day plans, I had the amazing opportunity to decide how much time I spend team building in all of my classes.  Going with the "go slow to go fast" strategy, we are starting slow.  In all of my classes I wanted to make sure students were acting how I wanted them to act for the whole year.  This included

• Being present - No cell phone use unless permission was granted
• Listen when others are talking - I wasn't going to yell over them
• Communicate and collaborate with one another

For myself, I decided to challenge myself to learn all student names by the end of the week.  This is actually a pretty big challenge for me but after reading Rick Wormeli, I decided to make it a priority.  Today I felt like everything came together to help me accomplish all of these goals.

First of all, I used Sara VanDerWerf's Name Tent idea.  I love it!  It gave me a way to look at names instantaneously.  I just wrote comments on all students tents too - it took like an hour, but I think it was WELL worth my time.  Now I have information about these students that I can match to a name/face AND I got feedback.

Then I got 100 piece puzzles from the dollar store.  Students were told to put together the puzzle as fast as possible.  They were automatically disqualified if they ripped the box... I have learned from watching grown adults stab the box and tear it open.  All students were engaged and I walked around and did 2 things:

1. I wrote down things students said that demonstrated the collaboration and persistence I was hoping they would - things like "I wonder what would happen if we flipped the puzzle around" "I need the grey pieces over here", "Good Job", "What are you working on over there?" - this is what students should be doing when they are working on problems!  Encouraging each other, developing strategies, etc!
2. I was working on names.  I could look at the names and the faces and get tons of practice in during that 15 minutes!  Students were fully engaged AND I was learning their names!  A 2-for-1 deal!

From there we talked about WHY they were doing the puzzle (to work collaboratively to solve a problem) and they were asked "What behaviors helped you be successful in this task?" I needed to clarify that I was looking for bigger-picture behaviors rather than puzzle-specific behaviors.  For example "we started with the edges" is not helpful, but "encouraging one another" or "considering others' perspective" is helpful.  We shared out as a class and then I collected their ideas on post-it notes.  I am going to re-read through these and summarize them tonight and bring the summary back to review tomorrow. 

Next we did a Talking Points routine with "talking about talking" topics which I learned about at TMC16.  It was a bit out there for a first day activity, but I explained to students that we will ALL try new things this year - and this was an example of ME trying new things - taking a risk, if you will.  

I needed to explain the routine a bit better, but once students understood the idea that they were going to talk about each point 3 times the conversations got better.  Some students still resisted the routine but overall, the conversations students had about talking and listening were really fascinating.  Everyone was engaged AND... I got MORE time to practice names. 

Finally, I spent 10 minutes talking about what the the course is, what they will need for class, and taking questions that they had.

Today felt great!  Students did a ton of talking and interacting with each other, we started to establish norms, we learned how to do transitions between activities, I have never felt THIS great about a start of the year.  Maybe it is naive, but I think it will be a good year with students.  I will be spending 3 more days getting students used to these norms, but so far, I am feeling pretty good about it!