Teaching

A simple but effective approach has been recreating student groups in Google chatrooms. I designated a recent assessment as a group assignment and added a collaboration component: Students had to create a chatroom with their assigned group and discuss the task there.

They were also required to invite me to join, which allowed me to eavesdrop on their mathematical conversations.

I was very impressed with the level of discourse in the chatrooms: In most cases I was observing the same kinds of productive conversations that I observed in our classroom. I also found myself interjecting just as I would in class — sometimes to answer a question, sometimes to ask one.

The chatrooms persisted after the official group assignment, continuing to serve as a place for both scheduled and impromptu collegial collaboration. And in an attempt to leverage the established community, a recent assessment involved selecting and submitting one problem from a set, subject to the restriction that no two students from the same group could submit the same problem. This forced students to communicate about their selection, and it left open the opportunity to use the group as a resource as they completed their individual work.

These chatroooms are easy to implement and very flexible: They can be used effectively both synchronously and asynchronously by students, and can be leveraged in a variety of different ways by the teacher. This is definitely a structure I’ll keep, and one that I’ll think more about as we move toward an uncertain new school year in the fall. 

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My emergency Remote Learning strategy has evolved primarily around teacher-student interaction. Given my limited experience and tool set, this has been my best leverage point. I’ve tried to establish a simple work-flow that lets me interact with students around mathematics, and that has formed an effective foundation for the course.

As the semester has unfolded I’ve tried to recapture some of what has been missing in this approach. One small thing we did recently was a peer review assignment that successfully recreated a little of the student-to-student interaction that’s been missing.

The activity centered on a typical assessment item, but rather than write my own I pulled an old Regents question. Longtime readers know I’m not a huge fan of Regents questions, but I wanted students to work on a specific kind of “applied” area / volume question that typically appears on the Geometry Regents exam. Also, by using an old test question, I could use the pre-existing rubric (as it were) and the published sample student responses as the basis for the peer review.

I assigned students to groups and distributed the scoring resources. After students submitted their own work they had to connect with their group and, using the scoring materials, perform their peer reviews. I captured everything in a Google form, where I could sort responses by reviewer or reviewee and look for consistency among the evaluations.

Usually the goal of peer review is to get students to engage with rubrics, but here it also served to get students interacting with each other. In my regular survey of students, one of the highest variance items had been:

I interacted with my classmates around mathematics this week.

Many students were naturally interacting with their peers, but many weren’t. This modest peer review activity succeeded in getting the entire class communicating with each other and interacting around their shared work.

And it was nice to find a standard classroom assignment that could be effectively repurposed to serve the goals of remote learning as well. As we look toward an uncertain future, we’ll need as many of those activities as we can find.

With 6 weeks left in the school year, it's probably a good time to start thinking about which of these #remotelearning practices could be effective next Fall.

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) May 18, 2020

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One thing I’ll miss from Remote Learning is rolling submissions of student work. As I discussed last week, students have 4-5 days to submit their assessments, and work that comes in before the deadline is evaluated and returned with feedback. Students can then choose to revise and resubmit their work before the deadline for full credit.

The approach has successfully created a consistent space to interact with students around their mathematical work. But it has also brought a welcome change in my grading workload. From the moment it’s assigned, student work trickles in slowly and steadily. This lets me evaluate a few at a time and quickly return them. Of course there are still plenty of students who wait until the deadline to turn in their work, but the incentive to submit early means there’s nothing like 100+ tests waiting for me all at once.

The ability to spread out my work has been invaluable during Remote Learning. The chaos of everyone working and schooling at home means uninterrupted blocks of time to focus are even rarer now. Knowing I can always turn an unexpected free 15 minutes into productive work helps keep all the balls rolling.

This process also has me approaching feedback differently, in a way that’s more like an ongoing conversation between teacher and student. I think we’ve both benefited, and it’s something I’ll continue to think about after Remote Learning has ended.

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Assessment of learning is one of the great challenges of teaching. It’s a complex endeavor under normal circumstances, made even more difficult in emergency Remote Learning. To math teachers, assessment often means testing, and some teachers are trying hard to replicate the experience of classroom tests. They’re experimenting with different delivery platforms, administering tests synchronously under time constraints, and even having students test in front of their webcams.

Other teachers have entirely abandoned tests in the traditional sense. I’m firmly in this group, but I do empathize with the former. I enjoy writing and giving a good test, and a steady stream of supervised student work is fuel for my instruction. But I just don’t see how I can give a traditional timed test in a fair and reasonable way in the current situation.

One approach I’ve taken is inspired by the principles of Mastery Grading. I’m assigning assessment items similar to what students would see on a test, but giving them several days to complete the work and allowing them multiple resubmissions after feedback. In this model, students can revise and resubmit their work until it is as complete and correct as they wish. It’s not an approach I’ve used much in the past, but it’s working for us: I like the interactions around mathematics I’m having with students as I provide them feedback, and I’m getting that stream of work I need to tune my teaching.

Some teachers are very concerned about cheating. I’m not one of those teachers. I’ve been teaching long enough to know that the vast majority of students will do the right thing when they, themselves, are treated right. There may be a few students looking for a shortcut, but those cases are isolated incidents to be handled individually.

While the system in place may be vulnerable to some abuse, I feel it treats students right. Everyone has a chance to master the assignment to their satisfaction, and the weekly assessments are frequent enough to dilute the stakes of any individual task. No student will feel penalized for doing the right thing, and the incentives to do the wrong thing have mostly been removed.

And all the evidence points to students doing the right thing. I grade the assignments on a rolling basis, and the work that comes in late shows the same kinds of correctable errors as the work that comes in early. Often students will submit something that’s mostly complete and say “I’m not sure what to do from here”. Usually a single hint or a suggestion is enough for them to finish up. The personal exchanges, in comments and resubmissions, serve as an audit of the student’s process.

I always assess in many different ways, some of which are less impacted by the circumstances of Remote Learning: individualized assignments, technology projects, and oral exams all work mostly as well now as before. But this new approach is working for us, and seems particularly well-suited to the circumstances. It requires trust, but then, all good teaching does.

Teachers who don’t trust their students must be having an especially hard time with #RemoteLearning.

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) April 30, 2020

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