Feedback for 140+ [repost]

originally posted August 9th, 2014

During our recent EnCoMPASS Summer Institute (#ESI14) Fawn Nguyen‘s comment that she’ll have 140 students this year, started me reminiscing. I, like Fawn does now, taught in southern California and having at least 140 students was normal. I usually taught 5 of our 6 class periods (at times I could have “sold” my sixth period but resisted it!) and classes could be as large as 36 students. That could mean 180 students but usually my load hovered around 150. It’s my normal mindset to think in terms of those numbers.

During #ESI14 we were talking about giving written feedback on the Problems of the Week (PoWs) either using the My PoW Work as a Teacher option of the PoWs or the EnCoMPASS software option and both of them can be daunting experiences if you are faced with 140 expectant students. Why didn’t I get feedback? When are you going to look at my work? Why did you write to her and not to me? Those are a few of the questions I can imagine students asking between the time they submit their work and when I promised they would have feedback … and, of course, the worst are the sad faces!

Here are some ideas I have for keeping sane!

Feedback Buddies
[During the Institute we talked about Revision Buddies (page 175 in Max's book, Powerful Problem Solving) and this idea can be built on it.] If you’re doing problem-solving activities in pairs, for any given problem give feedback to Student 1 of the pair. This cuts the amount of feedback in half for any given problem [70].

Group Buddies
If 70 is too great a number to handle, consider grouping pairs of Feedback Buddies and having groups of 4. Give feedback to Student 1 of the group. This cuts the amount of feedback in quarter for any given problem [35].

With either of the ideas for Feedback Buddies or Group Buddies, you would give feedback to Student 1 for Problem 1 and then Student 2 for Problem 2, etc.

Random 7
I’m thinking that if Fawn has 140 students and she has 5 class periods then she as 28 students in each class. I’m also thinking that she might use groups of 4. So, what if she used a Fast Random Number Generator app to come up with 7 students who would be receiving feedback on the PoW. She would give those seven students feedback and that’s how the groups would form to have conversations about her feedback and how they should use it to revise/improve their work. [If she happens to prefer groups of 3, then that would be Random 9 instead!) [35]

Random 3
This might be a way to start just because it’s VERY manageable for the teacher and it can be used to introduce the idea that you’ll be giving feedback and it might lead to conversations about what the process is and what the expectations are. Once the students have submitted, randomly choose 3 students’ work from any one class. (I wouldn’t pick a low, medium, high submission — I would do it randomly … or … I might not even pick one of my students’ solutions but instead lift a solution from the Teacher Packet and use it to generate your feedback!). [3] or up to [15] if each class is different.

In April, 2017, I joined Max Ray-Riek to talk about effective forms of written feedback. "We want [the students] to think more about the problem," says Max. "That's our goal in giving feedback: to say something to the student that makes them want to return to the problem and think again." You can view a short video on Heinemann's site: https://blog.heinemann.com/giving-feedback-to-students

The Quiet Game [repost]

originally posted September 5, 2011




Although I’m not preparing to start up my own classroom tomorrow, my thoughts still wander to what I “would do” and that brought me to reminiscing about The Quiet Game. Since being introduced to it in the early 90′s I’ve seen it in various settings and this morning when I googled “cooperative learning squares” I found other names for this game and the most common appears to be broken squares.


If this interests you my full instructions are here:

http://projects.ias.edu/pcmi/suzanne/thequietgame.pdf

With the game/activity or any like it I think it’s important to have the culminating conversation. I asked my students to consider “offer and receive” vs “grab and take” — how are they alike? how are they different?

It takes time and effort to introduce and establish a classroom environment with these characteristics:

* during group discussions students

• take turns
• explain their own thinking
• listen to others’ thinking
• paraphrase others
• respect differences of opinion
• justify their own reasoning
• revise their original conjectures

* during transitions from one activity to another students

• watch for signals from the teacher
• listen to directions
• pay attention to the amount of time and pace themselves
• follow classroom routines including know the designated place for handing in their work
• move about the room as directed and then as expected
• accept consequences when disciplined

I tried not to assume that students would know how to behave in my classroom. Playing the QuietGame was one way to introduce some of these expectations. Each time students reacted differently but it gave me an idea of where they were and what I might need to provide to help them develop a sense of community in my class. Most important for me was the culminating discussion.

Unsilence Students' Voices [repost]

When I decided to write an article with the title Unsilence Students’ Voices I thought long and hard about using the word “Unsilence”! Every time I typed that word the text editor underlined it in red reminding me that it was not a “real” word. Was I rebelling against that red underlining? Maybe! I decided that it expressed what I wanted to communicate and so I went with it. The article was published on pages 14-16 in the journal of the California Mathematics Council, the CMC ComMuniCator. CMC leadership kindly gave me permission to provide access to the PDF for viewing/downloading:

Unsilence Students’ Voices, September 2012, CMC ComMuniCator

On October 29, 2012 I received an email from Karen Cowe and she wrote, “You knew that one of these days I’d come knocking.” … “This will be the last Ignite! for me, so it would be great to finally get you up there!” I decided this was my opportunity to use what I had been learning from watching Annie, Max, and Steve (at that time my Math Forum colleagues who had each done several Ignite talks). One way to cope with the pressure of finally doing one myself was not to tell anyone at the Math Forum what I was planning to do!

On Saturday, December 1, 2012, mission accomplished! I presented an Ignite! talk on the same subject as my journal article at the California Mathematics Council - Northern Section (CMC-North) conference held in Asilomar, CA. It can be viewed on YouTube here:

Ignite: Unsilence Students' Voices

After that experience I thought of the connections between my experience of watching and learning and how that might play out in a mathematics classroom. There are students who are reluctant to participate at first and it may take time before they are ready to perform. Are they watching? Are they learning? When they’re ready, will they perform? I believe they are and they definitely will. And, as I talk about it in my own performance, if we create classroom environments to help unsilence their voices, there is even more of a chance that our students will perform!