At the end of the third year of teaching, I am thinking about what worked and what didn't. I'll start with what didn't:
- Trying to keep pace with another (awesome) teacher, but failing to stop and adjust when it was obvious that my students weren't getting it - this was huge elephant in my room all year and enormously frustrating
- Units on quadratics and polynomials - so much time spent, yet so little understanding demonstrated by students - I think this was because students were not given opportunities to tie everything together and figure out why they were learning all of the little methods for working with these functions
- Feedback - inconsistent and sometimes non-existent - failed to return assessments in a timely manner and allow students to analyze results, then adjust learning - my constant stress against time was felt hard here
- Resources - many students did not or could not or would not gain any benefits from the textbook or Edmodo resources or tutoring availability - need more online resources like free classes, videos, tutorials, interactive lessons to help struggling students
- Edmodo, in general - so few students used it (and I posted such great stuff!), despite my constant reminding and encouraging - why? How can I get them to buy into checking for my communication?
- Grades - My gradebook is still too assessment heavy - it is too disheartening for students to land themselves in a deep hole early in the semester - especially for struggling students. I would like to incorporate more self-assessments, standard mastery, and cooperative learning assessments (like those mentioned in a webinar by Jo Boaler recently: my notes, however incomplete)
- Assessments - ties in with grades... I used too many multiple choice (zip graded) quizzes and tests to save grading time. Noone gained enough information from this assessment style. Want fewer grades, in general, based on student performance and more grades tied in with student effort, collaboration, participation, quality of work, etc.
Ok, now for some things that worked:
- Kate Nowak's introduction to logarithms - wow! I will write up a detailed post about this later with my adaptation of her work. so cool with so many student "oh!s" around the room. not to mention how much better I understand logs myself.
- Homework checking/grading (adapted from Cynthia Thomas) - when I was consistent, it worked fairly well, but could still use some revamping.. Basically, they graded their own homework using a red pen, receiving 2 points for each correct answer (chose 5 problems to grade), then could earn back one point for each correction done in red pen on the paper. To save more class time, would like to integrate student work/solutions for homework questions. Maybe even an interactive homework discussion forum instead of using class time at all? or maybe less homework - Kate Nowak talks about when and why she gives homework and it's not very often...
- Educreations videos - some students really liked these videos when I posted them. Would like to continue a mix of these along with other online resources. Bummed that I had to give back my ipad even though that app is really the only thing I liked it for, but they do have an online whiteboard version that I tried out yesterday - some of the app features are missing, but it should work ok.
- Standard based grading - read about the assessment grading implementation by Dan Meyer and Kate Nowak (adapted from D. Meyer) and tried it out with last 2 units of the year. It worked fairly well, but there were plenty of issues, mostly from my lack of time to prepare. I should have more questions ready for re-quizzes in the beginning. Also, need to have time dedicated in class for students to analyze their work/scores, and figure out what this should look like. Not sure how this would fit in with the dual-credit course I'll be teaching this year - can students focus on skill mastery and then put it all together? i would hope so, otherwise, the skill mastery system is not really helping them, right?
- With engineering, had a couple of awesome lessons - Binary Number System (adapted from CS Unplugged) and Birthday Circuit Project (Karnaugh Mapping, Circuit Diagrams, MultiSim, and Breadboarding all tied together)
Many of my successes this year were the result of finding GREAT lessons and examples of teaching and classroom ideas in the blogosphere... even though Kate Nowak is no longer in the classroom, I learned so much from her this year. I basically start with her blog and go from there. She's actually the reason I decided to start blogging myself this summer - after hearing her speak at NCTM in New Orleans, I decided that, in the least, I could blog to give myself a place to document quality lessons and reflect. So, that said, I'm going to try to organize and post a few lessons this week that I loved from this year to get started.
