Category: Rubric

Resources for my NCTM Conference Talk Washington 2018

I hope there’s lots of interest in the lessons that I’ve learned from my years of having students journal. Here are some resources that you could use if you are interested in trying journals in your math classes.

Handout for NCTM Session Handout Schettino NCTM 2018

Blogposts about Journaling:

journals-paper-vs-digital-the-pros-and-cons/

what-i-get-out-of-student-writing/

revisiting-journals-getting-kids-to-look-back/

does-journaling-in-pbl-promote-resilience/

using-journal-writing-in-pbl/

Page: metacognitive-journaling/

Slides for Talk: Slides from Journal Presentation

Modeling with Soap Bubbles

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I am so very lucky to have a guest teacher with me this year at my school.  Maria Hernandez (from the North Carolina School of Science and Math) is probably one of the most energetic and knowledgeable teachers, speakers and mathematicians you could ever find – and we got her for the whole year!  We are so excited.  I am working with her and she is so much fun to work with.  I have been teaching calculus with PBL for almost 20 years now and thought I had all the fun I could but no!  Maria is bringing modeling into my curriculum and I’m enjoying every minute of it.

As we started teaching optimization this week, Maria had this wonderful idea that she had done before where we want to find the shortest path that connects four houses.

picture-of-houses

I let the kids play with this for about 10 minutes and then did this wonderful demonstration with some liquid soap bubbles and glycerin.  We had two pieces of plastic and four screws that represented the houses.  As the kids watched, I dipped the plastic frame into the liquid and voila-file_000

Right away the students saw what they were looking for in the shortest path.  Now they had to come up with the function and do some calculus. As they talked and worked in groups, It was clear that using a variable or one that would help them create the right function was not as easy as they thought.  However,  I was requiring them to write up what they were doing and find a solution so they were working hard.

file_000-1

We have been doing a lot of writing in Calculus this fall so far and they are getting used to being deliberate about their words and articulating their ideas in mathematical ways.

Here is the outline of the work they did in class: Shortest Path Lab

and here is the rubric that I will be using to grade it.

rubric-for-lab-3-2

The engagement of students and the buzz of the classroom was enough to let me know that this type of problem was interesting enough to them – more than the traditional “fold up the sides of the box.”  The experience they had in conjecturing, viewing, writing the algebra and solving with calculus was a true modeling experience.

If you decide to do this problem or have done something like it before, please share – I’d love to do more like this.  I am very lucky to have a live-in PD person with me this year and am grateful every day for Maria!

 

Journals: Paper vs Digital: The Pros and Cons

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I was totally honored the other day when I saw some tweets from TMC16 from @0mod3 and @Borschtwithanna

 

And yes it’s true, I’ve been writing and practicing the use of metacognitive journaling for very long time – probably since 1996 ever since I read Joan Countryman’s book about mathematical journaling and heard about it in many workshops that summer.  I wrote a rubric (make sure you scroll to the 3rd page) while I was at the Klingenstein Summer Institute for New Teachers (that’s how long ago it was) and since then I’ve been refining that rubric based on feedback from students and teachers. A few years ago, I finally refined a document called How to Keep a Journal for Math Class to a degree that I really like it now.  However, please know that lots of math teachers do journaling differently and without the metacognitive twist. I do believe that metacognitive writing is essential to the PBL classroom (read more here)

So this morning, I was asked this question on twitter

 

Which is something that many people often ask so I thought I’d respond with a more in-depth answer.

Here are the pros, I’ve found over the years of having students journal digitally:

Speed/complexity: Students are used to typing, using spell-check, inserting pictures, graphics and naturally including documents, links and thinking in the complex way that digital media allows them to.  It allows their journal to be more rich in content and sometimes connect problems to each other if their journal is say on a google doc that can connect to other html docs.  If they create, for example, iBooks or Explain Everything videos, there is even a lot more richness that can be embedded in the file as well – their creativity is endless.

Grading/Feedback: I found grading in Notability or on Google docs or some other digital platform really nice that allowed you to add comments with a click or audio extremely easy and quick.  I did not receive feedback from the students very often about how the feedback helped them though.  If you use an LMS like Canvas that integrates a rubric or integrates connection to Google it’s even nicer because you can have those grades go right from your assignment book to your gradebook.

I love having kids use digital platforms for writing/creating in mathematics when it is for a project or big problem that I want them to include many pieces of evidence, graphs, geogebra files and put it together nicely in a presentation or portfolio.  Not necessarily for their biweekly journals. Some guys who make use of digital journals in interesting ways are @GibsonEdu and @FrasiermathPBL at the Khabele School in Austin TX.

Here are the cons, in my mind of using digital journals: (which might be the “pros” of paper journals) – which is the side I have come down on.

the “real” writing factor: there is some research about the actual physical process of writing and the time it takes for kids to process their thoughts.  I do believe that when i want kids to be metacognitive about their learning and also want them to be thoughtful and take the time think about their initial error, think about what happened in class discussion to clear up their misunderstanding and also then what new understanding they came to.  That’s a lot of thinking. So I want them to take the time to write all that down.  Sometimes typing (like what I’m doing right now!) is a fast process and I’m not sure I do my best writing this way.

practice in hand-writing problem solving: this is re-enacting doing homework and sitting for assessments (in my class at least) and I want them to do this more regularly.  If in your class kids take assessments digitally or do homework nightly digitally then maybe they should do their journal digitally as well. This also give me practice in reading their handwriting, getting to hear their voice through their handwriting and seeing what it looks like on a regular basis.  In a time crunch on an assessment it honestly helps me know what they are thinking.

Conversational Feedback: I feel that when I hand write my feedback to them I can draw a smilely face or arrows or circle something that I want to emphasize more easily than when it is on something digitally (this is also true in a digital ink program – so that is something to consider, like Notability for example). I give feedback (see some journal examples on my blog) that is very specific about their writing and want the to improve not only in the math aspect of their writing but in how they are looking at their learning.  I want them to respond and I want to respond in the hope that we are starting a mathematical conversation about the problem.  I have received more questions about the feedback in the paper journals (like “what did you mean by this?”) than on the electronic feedback – not sure why.

Portability: I find that small composition graph paper notebook is extremely portable and easy for me to carry home to grade.  The students bring them to their assessments and there is nothing else in the notebook (no homework at all and no access to the internet) so I am not worried about academic honestly.

There are probably more but this is it in a nutshell – please add your comments below or tweet me to let me know your thoughts!

 

Someday I’ll get this assessment thing right… (Part 2 of giving feedback before grades)

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So, all assessments are back to the students, tears have been dried and we are now onto our next problem set (what we are calling these assessments).  What we’ve learned is that the rubric allowed us to easily see when a student had good conceptual understanding but perhaps lower skill levels (what we are used to calling “careless mistakes” or worse). We could also quickly see which problems many students had issue with once we compared the rubrics because, for example, problem number 6 was showing up quite often in the 1 row of the conceptual column.  This information was really valuable to us.  However, one thing we didn’t do was take pictures of all of this information to see if we could have a record of the student growth over the whole year. Perhaps an electronic method of grading – a shared google sheet for each student or something to that effect  might be helpful in the future – but not this day (as Aragorn says) – way too much going on right now.

We also changed the rubric a bit for a few reasons.  First, we found that when students completed the problem to our expectations on the initial attempt we felt that they should just receive 3’s for the other two categories automatically.  We considered not scoring them in this category but numerically felt that it was actually putting students who correctly completed a problem at a disadvantage (giving them fewer overall points in the end). Second, we also changed the idea that if you did not write anything on the revisions you earned 0 points for the revisions columns.  Many students told me afterwards that they felt like they just ran out of time on the revisions and actually had read the feedback.  This was unfortunate to me since we had spent so long writing up the feedback in the hope that the learning experience would continue while doing revisions.

Here is the new version of the rubric: Revised Problem Set Grading Rubric new

What we decided to do was to try the revisions this time without the “explanation” part of writing.  I think it will keep the students focused on reading the comments and attempting a new solution.  I was frankly surprised at how many students stuck to the honor pledge and really did not talk to each other (as they still got the problem wrong the second time around – with feedback).  Truly impressive self-control from the students in my classes and how they were sincerely trying to use the experience as a learning opportunity.

I do think the second assessment will go more smoothly as I am better at doing the feedback and the rubric grading.  The students are now familiar with what we are looking for and how we will count the revisions and their work during that time.  Overall, I am excited about the response we’ve received from the kids and hope that this second time is a little less time-consuming.  If not, maybe I’ll just pull my hair out but I’ll probably keep doing this!

 

 

 

Why Teachers Don’t Give Feedback instead of Grades, and Why We Should

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First in a series of posts about my experiences with “Feedback Before Grades”

Holy Mackerel is all I have to say – Ok, well, no I have plenty more to say – but after about a week and a half of holing myself up with my colleague, Kristen McVaugh, (big shout-out to Ms McVaugh who is not only teaching PBL for the first time but was willing to dive into this amazing journey of alternative assessment with me this year too), I am totally exhausted, almost blind as a bat, partially jaded and crazy – but mostly ready for a drink.  This little looped video of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats pretty much sums it up…

So here was our well-intentioned plan:  we wanted to start the year off with a different type of assessment.  I put out my feelers on twitter and asked around if anyone had a rubric for grading assessments where the teacher first gave only feedback and then allowed students to do revisions and then once the revisions were done the students received a grade. Kristen and I knew a few things:

  1. we wanted to make sure the revisions were done in class
  2. we wanted to make sure the revisions were the students’ own work (tough one)
  3. we wanted to give students feedback that they needed to interpret as helpful so that we weren’t giving them the answer – so that it was still assessing their knowledge the second time around
  4. we wanted to make sure that students were actually learning during the assessment
  5. we wanted students to view the assessment as a learning experience
  6. we wanted students to be rewarded for both conceptual knowledge and their skills in the problem solving too

So we created this rubric Initial Draft of Rubric for Grading.  It allowed us to look at the initial conceptual understanding the student came to the problem set with and also the initial skill level. Kristen and I spent hours and hours writing feedback on the students’ papers regarding their errors, good work and what revisions needed to be done in a back-handed sort of way.

Here are some examples:

Student 1 Initial Work
Student 2s initial work
Student 3 initial work

 

Some kids’ work warranted more writing and some warranted less.  Of course if it was wonderful we just wrote something like, excellent work and perhaps wrote and extension question.  The hard part was filling out the rubric.  So for example, I’ll take Student 3’s work on problem 6 which is the last one above. Here is the rubric filled out for him:

Student 3’s Rubric

You will notice that I put problem 6 as a 1 for conceptual understanding and a 2 for skill level (in purple). In this problem students were asked to find a non-square quadrilateral with side lengths of sqrt(17).  Student 3 was definitely able to find vertices of a quadrilateral, but he was unable to use the PT to find common lengths of sides.  I gave him feedback that looking at sqrt(17) as a hypotenuse of a right triangle (as we had done in class) would help a bit and even wrote the PT with 17 as the hypotenuse in the hope of stimulating his memory when he did the revisions.

The day of the revisions Student 3 was only capable of producing this:

Student 3 revisions

He followed my direction and used 4 and 1 (which are two integers that give a hypotenuse of 17, but did not complete the problem by getting all side lengths the same. In fact, conceptually he kind of missed the boat on the fact that the sqrt(17) was supposed to be the side of the quadrilateral altogether.

 

One success story was Student 2.  She also did this problem incorrectly at first by realizing that you could use 4 and 1 as the sides of a right triangle with sqrt(17) as the hypotenuse but never found the coordinates of the vertices for me. I gave her feedback saying there might be an easier way to do this because she needed vertices.  However, she was able to produce this:

Student 2s revision
Student 2s revision

Although she did not give me integer-valued coordinates (which was not required) and she approximated which officially would not really give sqrt(17) lengths it came pretty darn close! I was impressed with the ingenuity and risk-taking that she used and the conceptual knowledge plus the skill-level. Yes, most other kids just used some combination of 1’s and 4’s all the way around but she followed her own thought pattern and did it this way.  Kudos to student 2 in my book.

Next time I will talk about some of the lessons we learned, other artifacts from the kids’ work and what we are changing for next time! Oh yeah and some great martini recipes!

Being Inspired & About Intuition

In early January, I had the good fortune to go down to the NCSSM Teaching Contemporary Mathematics Conference in Durham, NC.  There were many wonderful speakers there including Dan Teague, Maria Hernandez, Gloria Barrett and the Key Note Speaker on Saturday morning, Gail Burrill.  Gail spoke about making up tasks and lessons that actually allowed students to ask good questions that made them think mathematically.  She gave many wonderful examples and talked a lot about the responsibility of the teacher to probe and use the following pedagogical strategies:

The tasks we give and questions we pose should ensure that students:

  1.  are actively involved in choosing and evaluating strategies, considering assumptions, and receiving feedback.
  2.  encounter contrasting cases- notice new features and identify important ones.
  3. struggle with a concept before they are given a lecture
  4.  develop both conceptual understandings and procedural skills
(National Research Council, Adding it Up (2001) and How People Learn (1999) From Burrill’s Presentation)
She also gave this wonderful rubric for Inquiry Math Tasks

It made me realize that because I use a PBL curriculum very few of the problems that we look at are actually full inquiry (or student-generated). Although what happens in class is that students will create questions that I think are wonderful and a lot of discussion stems from those questions.

It will be a whole other blogpost for me to detail how problem-based learning fosters every one of those in a meaningful way.  It really blew my mind when I was sitting there listening to her.  I was thinking,”This is an amazing framework to describe to people what PBL is like.”  In fact, at one point she said that she believe that all mathematical tasks should be done where students “work alone a bit, and then they share.”  I thought that is exactly the pattern of grappling with problems for homework and then sharing ideas the next day in class.  Gail never prescribed any methods or told anyone to follow any specific guidelines, but just stated these general ideas.  It was a wonderful talk.

Later on that morning, I gave a talk on teaching BC Calculus with problem-based learning.  Perhaps I made a comment too many about how I was against “teaching to the test” and a young man asked a question in defense of the AP Calculus exam itself.  He felt that the multiple choice section allowed students to learn or develop intuition about questions and problem solving and that the benefits of practicing such repetitive type questions was to gain that type of intuition for those topics and those questions.  Well, I hope I am remembering this question well enough, but I would argue that intuition for problem solving and intuition for problems is two different things.  There have been many mathematicians and mathematics educators throughout time from Polya to Alan Schoenfeld who have attempted to structure problem solving or how to teach problem solving to anyone.  From my readings, there is always a “reflection” step where you compare your ideas in the “novel” problem solving process (novel being the key word here, being something that you have not yet seen).  My argument being that repeating the same type of problem definitely ensure that on a test with the same type of problems you may be able, under pressure, to answer those problems correctly.  Does it show that you have developed an intuition on what to do in those types of problems?  Perhaps.  It might show that you have differentiated between the different types of outcomes of those problems.  Does it show that you understand that concept or that you understand what the question is asking?  I am not sure.  I have worked with enough students who have mastered the art of eliminating answers in a multiple choice scenario to know that it does now show understanding, but intuition about answering the question.

However, I do think that having a student practice problem solving in a way where you are faced with a novel problem on a regular basis (perhaps nightly – along with other problems that they have seen before) where they are asked to try something new and reach into their prior knowledge and write down what they think they might be able to do allows them to practice creativity, risk-taking, connection and sharing those ideas.  After a long period of time of doing this, it would seem that some type of intuition becomes habit and they develop more knowledge about mathematics overall. More importantly, “Students are thus engaged in the creation of mathematics, allowing them to see mathematics as a part of human activity, not apart from it.”  I believe that’s why PBL in mathematics is even more important than in other disciplines and that we need to change the culture of the classroom before asking more from our teachers and students.