APTT & The *@!%$ Shutdown

Hey, y'all!  I hope you're as jazzed as I am that fall has finally come.  Here in DC today was the first cool, rainy fall day.  It really made me want to drink tea and spend the day curled on the couch ready.  That's pretty mutually exclusive with actual teaching, though.  =)

I wanted to share a few ideas with you, and promise you that I'm still chugging way on items for my TpT store.  The first thing I wanted to tell you about is APTT.  Say whaaat?!  APTT stands for Academic Parent Teacher Teams, and it's a really data driven version of parent teacher conferences.  (You can read an interview with the creator of this model here.  It's less lame than I just made it sound.)  It was created to be more meaningful in schools with high populations of low(er) income families to share data in a meaningful way, despite the education level of the parents involved.  If we're being 100% honest the first year I did APTT I HATED it.  (In retrospect, I think that's because I was putting a TON of time into the conferences, but not getting the return back.)  However, I'm now in my third year of using this conference model, and I absolutely L-O-V-E it.  Now, I want to be honest with you, it's the same amount of work as it was the first year, but now I'm working with other teachers to put on the meeting, so it's divided among a team, AND the turn out is so much better.  Let me tell you a few reasons I love APTT.  First, it only focuses on academic data.  (I know what you're thinking, but honestly, I find conferences to be so much more positive when we don't discuss behavior.) The basic gist of APTT is that as a teacher, you select one long term goal for the year in reading and one in math and then basically you measure each student's progress toward that goal every 60 days throughout the year.  The other thing that I really like about APTT is that these are group conferences and we share all the kids' data, with all the parents, but we share the data anonymously.  It's really powerful, because it give parents a clear idea of a) exactly where their kids are, b) where all the other kids in the class/grade are performing, and c) what the current expectation is, and if their child is above or below it.  One last thing--APTT was originally created to share data with parents in lower income schools/districts, but I don't think that's the only environment in which this model would be successful.  That's basically the quick and dirty version of APTT.  If you have any questions I'm happy to answer them.

In other news I have to take about 45 seconds of your time to rage about this stupid federal shutdown.  It's so crazy; I mean, really I can't even talk about it.  I mean, it's so ridiculous that yesterday our principal had to send an email out that we can't order any more supplies/materials until the shutdown ends/budget is passed, so we all have ONE PACK of copy paper until whenever it is that the shutdown ends. Whether that's 2 days or 2 weeks.  Also, after next Friday schools will (likely) have to shut down because DC's rainy day fund will be dry and there won't be money to run the physical buildings.  The whole thing is such a mess.  Not to mention that federal employees (like the hubs) aren't getting paid at all right now.  Okay.  I have to move on.

Last, I'm hoping to glean some knowledge from y'all.  So I have a group of about 7 boys this year who are really struggling to get on the classroom community train.  They're just garnering a lot of negative attention, and slowing down the learning of the entire class.  Two of them are currently on a behavior plan that, honestly, seems at times to be extremely helpful and at times a huge time suck.  I think I'm going to launch table points on Tuesday, but does anyone else have (relatively easy) any ideas to help them settle/simmer and successfully participate in the class?

That's it.  Thanks so much for sticking with me!

Teaching at the End

Hello again, friends!  I almost said good morning, but the clock on my trusty laptop says it's 12:12pm, so I can guess that's not the appropriate greeting anymore.  I'm hoping to get accomplish lots of pesky goals today so I don't feel bad about going to the pool this afternoon.  I mean, it's 80 degrees and 40% humidity right now.  That NEVER happens in the DC summer.  And while I am very happy about the beautiful break in the otherwise oppressive summer it definitely makes it hard to do anything indoors. So let's get right down to it.

The biggest change, for me, with this inverted math model was teaching at the end.  When you do your launch at the beginning of the lesson you're just priming their brains for the job they have that day.  You're not really smacking them with any knowledge until the debrief at the end.  And what's even harder is when they collectively don't really get the idea on day #1 and you have to do the whole thing again the next day, or the day after that.

So as I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of your math block you'll have a 5-7 minute launch (potentially longer if you're teaching older kids) where you're basically reading the task, making sure everyone understands what their job is for that day, and potentially brainstorming some strategies.  You are NOT modeling an example, a similar problem, or showing them how to get started.  That's what they're figuring out with their partner.  Then they're spending all this time working and you debrief at the end.  During the time students are working you're circulating the room, observing and conferring.  I generally won't talk to my kids for the first 3 minutes or so of work time because it gives me a chance to see what they're really thinking and it gives them time to get started, and it breaks most of them out of the habit of using me as a crutch to get started.  Ideally, as you're circulating you're going to find a kid or 2 or 3 who are solving this problem in either a) the way you envisioned, b) a really cool way that you weren't thinking about but does work, or c) a rudimentary way that still works.  When you find a kid on target you want to ask them (or tell them) to share at the end.

Everyone runs their sharing differently, but during math mine basically works like this.  I would bring all the kids back to the carpet, and I will have the work of the kids who will share.  I'll generally praise the class for their hard work, because, really, this is hard work for kids who are only 6 or 7 years old.  Then I tell them that I want to show them what Mathematician X did that day.  I'll put that student's work up on the document camera and then I kind of take a step back and let that kid tell everyone else what he did.  I'll ask a few questions, but basically it's the kid's show at the point.  They get probably 1-2 minutes.  Then, I'm either going to bring up another kid who solved the problem correctly, but differently OR I'm going to jump in to wrap up.  My wrap up is really when I'm hammering that teaching home.  It's a mind-blowing light bulb time for them sometimes and it's so exciting to see their little math brains growing.  Basically, my wrap up is going to be a summary where I'm going to recap the work we saw and I'm going to leave them with a teaching point for future math work, sort of like the Lucy Calkins' writers workshop idea; something like "Today and everyday mathematicians, when you see a two digit number you'll know that that number is made up of tens and ones".  And then we're going to move on to something else in our day.

However, we all know that sometimes our first graders aren't exactly hitting the nail right on the head, and if that's the case then I'll just lead the share at the end.  I'll grab a blank sheet and model (quickly) how I would have done this problem, and model how I would think through the problem out loud.  Then, I'll finish with the same teaching point.  Again, the share, just like the launch is under 10 minutes.  5-7 is your best bet, because they were just working for so long.

It's so great when all these pieces come together and you have this full inverted workshop running in your classroom.  I really feel like students have a much deeper understanding of their math learning.