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!
Showing posts with label evaluation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evaluation. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Evaluating Inverted Workshop Math Products
Greetings, and happy Sunday, friends! I don't know about you, but I'm really starting to feel the back to school pressure. Which is why I was so happy when the weatherman predicted a gross Sunday, because it's much easier to convince the hubs that I need to spend a (summer) weekend working on school stuff when the weather is yucky. And it doesn't hurt that we both shirked all adult-like responsibilities and went to the pool all. day. long yesterday. It was glorious! And then we acted like we were both 22 again and went out way too late last night with friends. Whoopsie! But all in all it's been a very fun weekend; I even made eggs benedict this morning (first time ever)! You can start calling me Martha Stewart whenever you're ready. ;)
Today, I want to talk about evaluating student work/products in an inverted math model, especially since it's much less cut and dry than a typical word problem. Of course there are still answers that are right and wrong, but there's a lot of information you can learn from your students' work, even if their answer is ultimately incorrect.
Initially, I was using a simple check/check plus/check minus system to evaluate my littles' work during this time, but I really felt like it wasn't really meaningful for them or for me. And if evaluation isn't driving future/forward progress then what's the point? So I spent some time brainstorming and trying to think about what I really wanted out of my kids' work, and how I could communicate it to them in a kid friendly way. I've always liked the idea of rubrics, but conversely also frequently had a hard time using them in a meaningful way in my classroom. And then I was paging through this unit that I bought from Deana Jump and DeeDee Wills and they had a writing rubric inside that was based on smiley faces, which I thought was really brilliant, and it was sort of like the clouds parted and I had this flash of teacher brilliance: I could use a similar evaluation system for the math work that I was doing with my kids. But one thing that was really important to me is that my kids bought into the rubric, also. So I brainstormed the things that I really wanted to make sure were included in the rubric, and then I sat my kids down on the carpet the next day for math and I told them that we needed to think about what the very best first grade mathematician work looks like, and what it looks like when you're not doing your very best work and this is what we came up with.
After we made this chart, we had an epic dance party because we spent so much time on the carpet making it, then I laminated it and it hung up in our classroom the rest of the year. The next thing I did that I really think helped my kids have a clear understanding of the work at each level is that we evaluated some anonymous work together as a class. We went over what different mathematicians produced and I asked them what symbol they would have put on it, and then I showed them what symbol I actually gave it. We did this for about 2 or 3 days so that they really understood how to get smiley face exclamation point (which, by the end of the year, was one long word in our classroom--smileyfaceexclamationpoint). I really feel like this rubric helped my students be clearer about the way I was evaluating their work, and it gave us all a common language to use around discussing our mathematical work. It was great to see kids using the chart with their partners to think about what they needed to add to make their work even better.
For those of you wondering how I tracked the data across units, I'm here for you. =) I really tracked this data in 2 ways. I would create a chart in word of the problems we were doing each week, and all my kids names and then I would just put the symbol they earned in their box. This allowed me to look across the week and see if there was a student who really understood and should maybe be pushed harder, or if there was a student, or group of students who really didn't seem like they were understanding our content that week. The other way I tracked it was numerically, in a grade book so that I could use these symbols to factor into my students' math grades at the end of the quarter. I just used a 4/3/2/1 system, with the 4 being equivalent to the smiley face exclamation point, and the 1 being equivalent to the straight face. I didn't use 3/2/1/0 because I feel like zeros can really wreck an average. But you are, of course, the boss of you.
Honestly, I had planned to talk about evaluation and leading a share/debrief in the same post, but I feel like this is already a super long post, so we'll save leading the debrief for tomorrow. And last but not least I am working hard at making my debut on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I'll be sharing the documents that I use in my own classroom to make this model work--planning guides, tasks that I've already written, blank rubrics for you to fill in, and maybe a quick how-to guide, if you think that would be helpful. I hope to have all of those documents ready to go by this Wednesday. If there's anything else you'd like to know let me know! I aim to please. =)
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
Rachel
Today, I want to talk about evaluating student work/products in an inverted math model, especially since it's much less cut and dry than a typical word problem. Of course there are still answers that are right and wrong, but there's a lot of information you can learn from your students' work, even if their answer is ultimately incorrect.
Initially, I was using a simple check/check plus/check minus system to evaluate my littles' work during this time, but I really felt like it wasn't really meaningful for them or for me. And if evaluation isn't driving future/forward progress then what's the point? So I spent some time brainstorming and trying to think about what I really wanted out of my kids' work, and how I could communicate it to them in a kid friendly way. I've always liked the idea of rubrics, but conversely also frequently had a hard time using them in a meaningful way in my classroom. And then I was paging through this unit that I bought from Deana Jump and DeeDee Wills and they had a writing rubric inside that was based on smiley faces, which I thought was really brilliant, and it was sort of like the clouds parted and I had this flash of teacher brilliance: I could use a similar evaluation system for the math work that I was doing with my kids. But one thing that was really important to me is that my kids bought into the rubric, also. So I brainstormed the things that I really wanted to make sure were included in the rubric, and then I sat my kids down on the carpet the next day for math and I told them that we needed to think about what the very best first grade mathematician work looks like, and what it looks like when you're not doing your very best work and this is what we came up with.
After we made this chart, we had an epic dance party because we spent so much time on the carpet making it, then I laminated it and it hung up in our classroom the rest of the year. The next thing I did that I really think helped my kids have a clear understanding of the work at each level is that we evaluated some anonymous work together as a class. We went over what different mathematicians produced and I asked them what symbol they would have put on it, and then I showed them what symbol I actually gave it. We did this for about 2 or 3 days so that they really understood how to get smiley face exclamation point (which, by the end of the year, was one long word in our classroom--smileyfaceexclamationpoint). I really feel like this rubric helped my students be clearer about the way I was evaluating their work, and it gave us all a common language to use around discussing our mathematical work. It was great to see kids using the chart with their partners to think about what they needed to add to make their work even better.
For those of you wondering how I tracked the data across units, I'm here for you. =) I really tracked this data in 2 ways. I would create a chart in word of the problems we were doing each week, and all my kids names and then I would just put the symbol they earned in their box. This allowed me to look across the week and see if there was a student who really understood and should maybe be pushed harder, or if there was a student, or group of students who really didn't seem like they were understanding our content that week. The other way I tracked it was numerically, in a grade book so that I could use these symbols to factor into my students' math grades at the end of the quarter. I just used a 4/3/2/1 system, with the 4 being equivalent to the smiley face exclamation point, and the 1 being equivalent to the straight face. I didn't use 3/2/1/0 because I feel like zeros can really wreck an average. But you are, of course, the boss of you.
Honestly, I had planned to talk about evaluation and leading a share/debrief in the same post, but I feel like this is already a super long post, so we'll save leading the debrief for tomorrow. And last but not least I am working hard at making my debut on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I'll be sharing the documents that I use in my own classroom to make this model work--planning guides, tasks that I've already written, blank rubrics for you to fill in, and maybe a quick how-to guide, if you think that would be helpful. I hope to have all of those documents ready to go by this Wednesday. If there's anything else you'd like to know let me know! I aim to please. =)
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
Rachel
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