Results of my first "chaotic classroom" lesson.

The assignment was a group project.  The goal of the assignment was to encourage and develop the following 21st century workplace skills: teamwork, collaboration and time management.  The class was divided into six groups of 5.  Each group had to prepare a google slide presentation on "Bodily Systems." Note: This topic was an attempt at cross-curriculum integration.  All students had just completed that unit in Science.  Existing knowledge is helpful in reducing the amount of time students spend on the internet doing research.

Each team was assigned a team leader.  Each student had to record their work on a daily progress report.  Each group member had a piece of the assignment but the final project had to be a uniform, cohesive product.

In conclusion, I found that this assignment motivated previously unengaged students.

interactive questioning

I learned a great way to create questions that the students can't wait to answer!

https://getkahoot.com/

An interactive way for students to answer questions by using their phone.  The teacher creates questions, or a survey and the students answer via cell phone.  The quicker they answer, the more points they get so they get excited about answering the questions.

The Stanford d.school model

Stanford Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course.

I first read about the Stanford School of Design (or d.school) back in 2011 (when this year's seniors were freshmen).

I've tried to slip in some of the d.school's "design thinking" concepts and strategies into the classroom ever since. I especially love their "bias to action" philosophy, being a leap-before-you-look type of guy.

Anyway, the d.school approach is chaotic in the mathematical sense, meaning that there's an underlying set of rules, values and a guiding structure but the goal of each interaction is to unleash creativity which eventually leads to unpredictable results.

Think of a well-paced musical jam session only instead of notes, you're trading ideas on how to build a low cost water filtration system for African villages, say.

This video shows a single crash course. It runs a little over an hour in length, but because they've recorded the full session, you can speed through the static passages.

The main things I think a teacher can borrow from this video are the strategies used to gather everybody's attention and how keep groups moving onto the next task and not be afraid to impose a little time pressure on the participants. It's also interesting to watch how the session leaders behave and keep busy in between the moments of whole group attention.

This particular session starts with a simple set of reciprocal interviews in which two participants ask each other to reflect on the gift-giving experience. The end goal is to generate some ideas on how to make gift-giving more rewarding to both the giver and recipient alike.

Encouraging and cultivating a problem solving mindset in your students

This psychology's research shows that we can change our mindset:

http://examinedexistence.com/carol-dweck-on-fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset/

Regents Review Questions and Ideas

Diana Callahan and Anna Shapiro

Questions to ask before structuring Regents Review for Algebra and Geometry classes:

1. How can we keep students interested and motivated?
a) Are games academically beneficial or just entertaining?
b)How can we make review more interactive and get all students involved?




2. What is the best way to structure a review?


We are deciding if it's better to review by topic or just to go through practice questions in the order they were asked on the past exams.




3. What are the best strategies for retention?
a) Does assigning practice questions for homework help?

Idea: Students create index cards by topic to help them retain information. They must complete their own research on each topic. They can use chrome books, notebooks, laptops from classroom, past review sheets, and any other resources they may have. The index cards will be used to help them solve practice Regents problems.

Another Idea: Students will create their own review sheet using methods as described above with the index cards. For this activity, students will be split into groups by topic. They will use laptops to do research and be required to write key ideas, find 3 Regents questions and solve them using the methods described in the review sheet.

Sam's student-centered classroom!

Great way to incorporate student's voice!  Student's have a choice but will they work on the stuff they don't get?

My second half of Week 14 lesson plan.


This comes after a disaster day (May 19, which included a bomb threat evacuation on top of three subpar classes in a row) in which, upon reflection, I felt myself drifting away from fundamental principles from the first professional development session.

Before writing this lesson, I tried to codify those fundamental principles in a single page document I could pass out at the professional development session: Questions to Ask Before Structuring an Assigment.

 

Three Key Questions [Thoughts before the May 20 PD session]

Questions to ask before structuring an assignment:

1. What is the work product?

As noted in the last session, tests and quizzes appear to be the primary work product in a typical math class. Not surprisingly, student buy-in tends to dwindle as the year develops.

Art and journalism classes have an edge on us in the motivation department, because the student has a more personal stake in the outcome. The work reflects their unique identity in many ways. For example, in doing a podcast assignment, the student gets to pick the topic of discussion and the questions for the interview. In the editing process, the student gets to control what gets said and when. The score is of secondary importance to the simple act of putting out something that affirms the student’s own choices.

In short, if the work product is meaningful to the student, it gives students who might otherwise drop their heads a chance to lend whatever talent they have to the effort.

2. How can I build pride of work into the assignment structure?

Adolescent students are a paradoxical blend of impulses: They’re constantly competing with one another for attention, status, sexual capital, etc. And yet, they’re hyper-aware of adult criticism and situations that lead to such.

Long story short, they know when to fold ‘em. And quick.

Journalism teachers report success in work cycle that puts the grading process in the middle. Students build a draft independent of teacher direction (and criticism). Once this draft is completed, the work is submitted for peer review. It is during this review that common sense critiques emerge  (e.g. “Shouldn’t the project have a title?”). The teachers are using peer-pressure, essentially, to raise room level standards and triggering whatever pride impulse the student might have to compel a revision.

3. How much do the students really need me to learn this topic?

The answer varies depending on the teacher and the room, but I think most math teachers would agree that the best and worst students will continue along their regular trajectory regardless of lesson style. That leaves the vast middle to win over. Any strategy that puts two-thirds of the room on your side is worthy of experimentation.

Student Initiated Classroom in the Cloud

TOK Groupwork: Cycle 2 -- With Work Samples

This was my second attempt to put some of the concepts we'd been discussing in the first PD cycle into play in Theory of Knowledge classroom.

I will post a reflection on my first attempt at a later date. Like a lot of first attempts, it was a little shaky, so I didn't feel any strong urge to broadcast the results.

In the case of this second project, things glued together better, thanks in large part to me using the project management tool Trello, which Deb recommended, instead of a spreadsheet to monitor work flow.

Another key improvement over the first cycle was the simpler nature of the task. In TOK we wrestle with some pretty heavy language and some very heavy concepts (Aristotelian empiricism vs. Plato's Theory of Forms, cartesian duality, scientism, etc.) To make things more accessible -- and to relate it to a parallel writing assignment, their introductory college essay, I challenged students to focus on telling a simple story about a person significant to the history of science.

I started with a project with an "auction" in which I announced the profile subjects, I was in the "market" for: Galileo, Mendeleev, Mendel, Einstein, Curie and Newton, along with two major philosophers of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. I gave each student a post-it, 5 minutes to pick a topic and do some cursory research and told them to go the place in the room associated with that profile subject to see who else wanted to collaborate.

I'd tried this motivation before, so I had a feeling it would work well. It did. For the first day, I mainly kept out of the way. My only involvement was to play match-maker, recruiting students and throwing ideas toward the projects attracted only one or two takers. Once the room gelled into stable groupings, I basically instructed all groups to keep adding post-its until the bell rang. By the end of the period, I had a pretty good visual sense (via number of post-its) on which groups could work well independently and which groups needed help.

On the second day, I challenged students to come up with a "story board" depicting a key before, during and after storyline in which the profile topic (or the culture of science) made an important breakthrough.  My key focus here was Mendeelev and his painstaking development of the Periodic Table.

On the third day, I handed out a blank sheet written in a storyboard template. At the time, I was hoping to get a member from each group to produce a storyboard for us to post on the wall, but only a few groups were able to deliver anything. I decided not to rush the process and used the class time to focus on pinning down project parameters for the second week.

Pinning down project parameters basically amounted to getting groups to name their leader, to start and share a presentation file to me and to confirm the existence (via a Homework form) of an ongoing "Works Cited" document. What instruction I'd been offering to the whole group had focused on the need to push past easy sources (e.g. Biography.com, wikipedia.org and to come up with something an academic would respect).

One new twist I added to this project was a peer grading component -- again through Google Forms. I created a 20 pt. rubric based on five main components, each scored on a 0 - 4 scale:

1. Uniqueness of work product
2. Quality of Overall Execution
3. Quality of Content (including images and layout choices).
4. Quality of Writing 
5. Degree to which the work offers a good representation of the Curtis IB program

The highest scoring presentation posted a 17.75 out of 20 points, proof that, even when given the chance to stuff the ballot box, IB students are pretty tough peer graders.

The following is a list of the top four scoring presentations:

• Dmitri I. Mendeleev [17.75 pts.]
• Galileo Galilei  [17.56 pts.]
• Father of Modern Genetics  [17.18 pts.]
• Marie Curie [17.08 pts.]

Note Before the May 6 Session

Here's the rough agenda I was planning for today before my Wednesday schedule got reshuffled.

Emphasis on Work Product

In our first cycle, we titled this session "Running a Journalism-type Classroom." One of our first points of discussion was that this title was a little awkward. This led, in turn, to the catchier "Chaotic Classroom" title.

One thing that quickly came out of the first meeting, however, is that the journalism teachers are miles ahead of the teaching staff when it comes to getting their students to focus on what it takes to develop a meaningful work product. In other words, when students interview each other for an article or podcast, it isn't just about checking off boxes on some grading rubric: It's about telling a story that both you and your peers will respect.

This is a big challenge in math and, from what I've seen in the last week, business classes as well: Projects have a meaningful aim, but they also have a busywork component that many students quickly sniff out. Maybe it's distance between the subject matter being discussed and the student's own experience. I'd like to discuss how to close the gap between journalism and the rest of the school when it comes to getting basic students to show pride in work.

Relating my own teaching experience since the last PD session, I have put my Theory of Knowledge classes through two project cycles. In the first, I had students research and write about general topics related to science: the Scientific Method,  the role of peer review in science, etc. The resulting presentations were kind of lame and uninspiring to grade. It was a good learning experience, but I think I was learning more than the students were.

For the second cycle, I tried to "story" things up a little. I asked the students to pick from a list of revolutionary figures in the history of science and discuss that person's life, focusing on what elements, both personal and historical, made that person revolutionary. For example, students writing on Galileo, were to investigate the historical context (the late Renaissance), the thinking that preceded Galileo (the Copernican heliocentric model), the tools that facilitated Galileo's research (the telescope), not to mention Galileo's personality when it came to defying the scientific and religious authorities of the age.

Long story short, the work came out a lot better and was a lot more fun to grade. For the first time this year, I felt like I had something I'd be happy showing to I.B. parents, not to mention other I.B. teachers.

I think this focus on generating a quality work product over grading individual student performance is a critical mind shift that needs to be discussed in depth. How do we incentivize and broadcast good work, so that students know that they're not just generating something for the teacher's eyes only? Should we be working the Art department into this discussion as well? This is something they deal with on a daily basis as well.

Brainstorming and the d.school Model

My department has been doing teacher-to-teacher intervisitations.  I used this as an opportunity to sit in on Christine's class for a week in Room 341. One thing I quickly noticed is that, once students have taken their seats and logged on to the computers in Room 341, the teacher practically has to shout at the top of her lungs to get the full room's attention.

Journalism teachers might have more experience on how to get the whole group to turn away from the computer screen, but even then, you've got the machines battling you for student attention every second of the lesson.

My advice to Christine after my second visit was to not fight the technology, to let students focus on the computer and communicate via online commenting or direct person-to-person interaction. I watched her do this on the third and fourth day and noticed a big uptick in the productivity level of the room.

Looking back, I think Christine's idea to get a group discussion going in the early stages of the project was a noble one. It just seemed like too much of an uphill battle to be any fun for her or her students. How can we build better discussion into the cycle, especially at the front end when we're really trying to get students to think creatively? We talked about getting students to be thoughtful about their work after the first draft. What about before?

Stanford's Design School (or d.school) runs an interesting series of courses on what they call "Design Thinking," borrowing ideas from the best tech companies. The course puts a heavy focus on the brainstorming process and creativity. I think our students would love this kind of instruction.

This video runs through a full hour-long design cycle class. It's too long for a single PD session, but the first 10 minutes give you a taste of how they get a room full of adults to turn off the devices and thinking about a project from a total blank-slate perspective. I think we can steal a few of these tricks to get the ideas flowing a little more smoothly in our classrooms.

Detecting Signal amid the Noise

As we noted in the very first discussion, there's a difference between good chaos and bad chaos. It also takes a while for a teacher to know that difference.

This came up in my observation of Christine's classes. There were times when her students were on- point, executing and displaying accountable talk and, yet, she couldn't see it or hear it (for various reasons) and therefore wasn't getting the positive feedback she needed to know what was working well for her.

I'm sure the same thing goes on in my classroom. My eyes and ears are trained to seek out the four or five kids blatantly off task instead of the four or five kids doing something mind-blowingly creative. I can't "read" chaos as well as some teachers can, so I tend to play it safe when it comes to lesson planning.

Like I said above, emphasizing collective work product over individual performance seems like a good place to start. It requires both a psychological shift on the part of the teacher and a cultural shift on the part of the entire classroom, though. What should teachers still on the back end of this shift be looking for? I'd like to hear more about what the process looked like for the more experienced teachers as they went through it the first times.

In short, how do rewire our brains to seek out the positive and not worry so much about the negative aspects of increased student independence?