Term 3 Goals

It's Sunday afternoon, the day before Term 3 starts. I can't believe we are already halfway through the school year here in Australia, and that I've been in this country for 6 months! Time has flown by.

This will be my second term flipping my year 7, 8 and 9 maths classes, and I have thought a lot about how to improve on the model this term. These are my goals for improving my classroom lessons this term:

Goal Number 1
Use more problem solving within lessons, starting with teaching students how to solve problems, with help from George Polya. More on this here.

Goal Number 2
Improve techniques for formative assessment. I thought it would be great to incorporate technology into this goal, and after looking around at various options I have decided to try using the student response system Socrative. I think I will start using it by doing Exit Tickets at the end of lessons, along with multiple choice or short answer questions to start off the lesson to see how well the students have understood the video the night before.

I have also planned some formative tasks into my Year 8 and 9 units.

Year 9 will be doing a unit on Linear Relations so I will be using these two tasks from the Mathematics Assessment Project Classroom Challenges, which is an American Resource:

Lines and Linear Equations
Modeling Solutions with Linear Equations

Year 8 are doing a unit on Probability. Before any theory is taught the students will be doing this activity from the Nuffield Foundation:
Three Dice
Which involves a game where students have to try and choose the numbers that will occur most frequently when three dice are thrown. I love the Nuffield Foundation activities because not only do they give detailed information on how to teach and assess mathematical processes, they also give examples of students work and the types of questions you might ask students to really see if they have a deep understanding of the mathematics.

I will also used some activities from Nrich, which has a fantastic section on teaching probability, including research and case studies of schools who have used the tasks. The tasks I am going to use are:
Which Team Will Win
The Dog Ate My Homework
These activities will also help me to achieve Goal Number 1!

Goal Number 3
I really want to improve the behaviour of my classes, namely my all boys Year 8 class. Before the holidays I started using Class Dojo with them, which seemed to help, so I will continue to use that. What I liked about Class Dojo is that you can keep track of both positive and negative behaviour at the same time. As a class we came up with rewards for those students who consistently display positive behaviour. The best part is that the rewards are not things like prizes or chocolate. The reward is a certificate for those who have over 95% positive behaviour for the week, and longer term is a letter home to their parents.

Which leads me to a "sub-goal" of Goal Number 3, and that is to communicate more with parents. Calling parents, for either good or bad news, is so effective, and I KNOW this! It's just that at 5:30pm when I am drained after a day at school, the last thing I want to do is get on the phone with a parent. But the pay off is worth it, and I always feel that way when I finish the call. I'm always so glad I did it once it's over. (In a way calling parents is a bit like exercise... you know you should, you know you'll feel better once it's done, and even while it's happening... but the thought of it is just so overwhelming!) Maybe I need to find a better time to call them, and not leave it until the evening when I just want to get home. I will have to think more about that one.

Anyway, 3 goals is enough for anyone, and I hope I have made them 'smart' enough that I will be able to make progress towards achieving them. I look forward to reporting the results here on this blog on a regular basis. (I feel another goal coming on...)

More problem solving please!

We've had about 8 weeks of flipped learning in maths now in Year 7,8 and 9. As mentioned in my previous post, not all classes have been running smoothly, however I'd have to say that my classes have pretty much accepted that this is the way we do things now. As you'd expect some students have adapted better than others, and those that consistently watch the videos, write good summaries and try to ask interesting questions are benefiting the most. The culture of the classroom is slowly changing.

I mentioned at the start that in terms of class work I've pretty much stuck to what the students are familiar with, which are questions from the text book. I do try to find more interesting worksheets (usually from the old SMILE resources used in England before I was even a teacher, or some of the CIMT activities), but it's not always inspiring stuff. Now that the structure of flipped learning is in place I want to spend more time designing interesting activities for the students to do in lessons.

The issue that needs tackling is that currently our students are not great problem solvers (as a whole, of course there are exceptions to this!) I've taken problem solving to mean "any task for which the solution method is not known in advance".

In a recent department meeting we discussed reasons that might stop students from attempting complex problem:

• They don't understand the problem
• They are unsure of how to get started
• They don't know any strategies to solve the problem
• They feel they are not good at maths
• The problem is not interesting to them
• They are unwilling to take risks or experience failure

All of these issues are things that we can do something about as teachers. The one that is most obvious for us to tackle is to actually teach the students strategies for solving problems in a structured way. Sometimes as teachers we are very quick to complain about lazy students who don't try, but if we've never tried to help them improve their strategies than who's fault is it really??

So, in Term 3 we will start a Problem Solving programme with Year 7, 8 and 9 classes. We have based this around George Polya's 4 Principles of Problem Solving:

1. Understand the Problem

2. Devise a Plan

3. Carry out the Plan

4. Reflect on the Solution

Currently the students are mostly doing questions that only use Step 3: That is they are given a method to use to answer questions and the carry out the computation. But the other 3 steps are what are going to be most useful to them not only in a maths classroom, but in other subjects and beyond the classroom into the "real world".

We will teach each of these 12 heuristics:

1. Guess and improve

2. Make an organized List

3. Draw a diagram

4. Make a table

5. Look for a pattern

6. Solve a simpler problem

7.Experiment

8. Act it out

9. Work backwards

10. Use deduction

11. Change your point of view

12. Write an equation

The idea is to teach one of these strategies each week over 12 weeks. We will spend about 20 minutes each week on this, no more, and continue with the "regular" curriculum at the same time. At the end of the 12 weeks students will be presented with a variety of problems and have to start to make decisions about what strategies to use. They will be formally taught to use the 4 Principles each time they tackle a problem. Hopefully, students will start to  naturally use these strategies with their textbook questions as well. 

As mentioned before, we will use this with Year 7, 8 and 9, with the aim that in the future we will teach it in Year 7 only but constantly refer to the strategies throughout all year groups. 

Our aims for the program are this:

1. Improve students' willingness to try problems and increase perseverance
2. Make students aware of problem solving strategies
3. Make students aware that there is more than one way to solve a problem
4. Improve students' ability to work systematically
5. Improve students' ability to choose and implement a suitable strategy for solving problems

I have high hopes about this program and look forward to reflecting on what is working (and what is not) on the blog in Term 3.

Many thanks to Tom Reardon for his helpful paper on this, accessed here