Teaching

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

Related Posts

• Remote Learning — Week 8
• Remote Learning — Week 7
• Remote Learning — Week 6
• Remote Learning Journal

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.

Related Posts

• Remote Learning — Week 6
• Remote Learning — Week 5
• Remote Learning — Week 4
• Remote Learning Journal

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

Related Posts

• Remote Learning — Week 5
• Remote Learning — Week 4
• Remote Learning — Week 3
• Remote Learning Journal

I established a simple and productive work cycle for my classes during the first two weeks of Remote Learning. With a foundation in place, I’m now trying to find ways to reproduce what we’re missing from our typical in-person classes.

One thing I tried was starting the week’s unit with a single question.

“The area of one of these regions is easier to compute than the other. Why?”

A nice opener to our area unit: I captured and shared some representative student responses and gave them some follow-up questions to consider for homework.#math #mathchat #geomchat #RemoteLearning pic.twitter.com/Jfm3Z1pdtO

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) April 20, 2020

After answers came in I shared some representative responses with the class:

The shape on the left is easier to compute the area of because it can be divided into recognizable polygons (such as a triangle)

It is easier to compute the area of the region on the left because it is made out of lines.

The region on the left’s area is easier to compute since it can be triangulated.

Then I posted follow-up questions for students to think about as homework:

• Why do straight lines make finding area easier?
• Why does breaking something up into triangles and rectangles make its area easier to compute?
• An answer to the previous question might be “Because we have formulas for those shapes”. Why, then, do we have formulas for the areas of those particular shapes?

This work motivated the next day’s video, which was designed to leverage this specific conversation (as discussed in last week’s post), which launched our standard cycle of

Video Intro➜ Text + HW ➜ Formative Assessment Quiz ➜

Written Work Submission ➜ Feedback and Revision

I often design lessons around simple but provocative questions like this, stirring up conversation and debate and then moderating a whole-class discussion that leads us in the right direction. In the first few weeks of Remote Learning I’ve been missing that. This small change brought back a little of what’s been missing.

Related Posts

• Remote Learning — Week 4
• Remote Learning — Week 3
• Remote Learning — Week 2
• Remote Learning Journal