About two weeks ago, one of the supervisors at Curtis called me up asking if I'd be available to teach a five day Regents Review course for the upcoming Geometry and Common Core Geometry exams.
It was a weird request if only because I hadn't taught Geometry since 2012 and wasn't too current on the changes imposed by Common Core.
Then again, the money was good. That and the fact I tend to enjoy Regents Review classes, where you can be a little more relaxed than in a regular classroom setting, led me to say yes.
Going in, I figured it was a good chance to push forward on some of the classroom management strategies discussed in our spring 2015 meetings and on this blog.
For me, that meant switching away from the usual chalk-and-talk or SmartBoard presentation format and running everything through a growing collection of laptops I've started bringing to every classroom I visit. I also saw it as a good chance
Technology being a double-edged sword, I immediately found myself up against two obstacles: 1) Google Classroom wouldn't register any kid with an email address outside the curtishs.org domain -- i.e. just about every kid who showed up that day. And 2) the laptop I'd borrowed to run the SmartNotebook software was having a troubled relationship with the classroom's built in SmartBoard system. It was at this point that I thanked myself for bringing four additional laptops (my own personal MacBooks, plus a Chromebooks and two Notebooks. Stealing a trick from my last two substitute coverage experiences, I handed each machine to a kid the moment he walked through the door, asking him to fill out a start of class survey I'd whipped up that morning on Google Forms.
With nary a shrug, each got down to work, supplying the necessary info while I took the moment to think ahead.
Shifting away from Google Classroom, I decided to have each kid register into Trello, a management system I'd been running throughout the spring.
If you don't know anything about Trello, it's basically a digital bulletin board. What you do as a project (or class) manager is create a series of lists representing the workflow of whatever project you're trying to execute. List headings for my review session, for example, included Research, Waiting for Teacher Feedback, Reflection. Basically, each list is a stage I wanted students to go through before moving on to the next task.
Within each list, you can basically create a card "icon" out of thin air. This new icon can represent anything you want it to represent and can be dragged from list to list, giving the manager a quick visual indicator of progress (or lack thereof)
Again with the double-edged sword thing: I hadn't really put much thought that morning into what each card represented in the case of a review session, and the blank slate nature of the Trello "card" format is that can orient your project workflow to just about any cardinal point on the compass. For example, did I want each card to be representing an individual student or group of students or maybe something a little more abstract, like a topic or question of interest?
As the kids went through the hurdles imposed by Trello's registration process, I realized that it probably made the most sense if the card represented a sample problem from the test we were going to go through. I wanted to start with the first Common Core Geometry exam (administered in June) and my objective hope was that I could get each kid to take ownership of at least one problem and present its solution to the group.
Trello's wonky registration process was yet another bug/feature Rorschach test. From across the hall, I could hear another teacher already launching into a lecture review for the U.S. History regents, while my first three students were still waiting to get confirmation. I debated whether to scrap the exercise altogether, until the first kid's computer screen showed the main Trello page with "Geometry Regents Review" as an accessible "board. " I suddenly realized that I now had a chance to give each kid a staggered one-on-one tutorial on how the system worked and how I expected them to carry out the review process.
Things went pretty swimmingly from there. My first registered kid worked his way through the first problem on the test. It wasn't the toughest problem, but in our back-and-forth -- logged via text messages on the "Problem 1" card, I emphasized that the point of a review session isn't to master the problems on a previous test so much as to anticipate how the same topic or skills might show up on the next test. The problem in question (Problem 2 on the June 2015 New York test) asked which transformation, of the four listed, might result in a shape not congruent to the pre-image.
As other kids launched their own Trello sessions, the first kid and I were able to play the role of a fictional test writer and come up with away to rewrite problem's language -- which of the following is not evidence of an isometric transformation -- recylcing the same four answer choices.
Things weren't perfect. I had one kid in the sparsely attended morning session who could work his way successfully through only one problem in the time allotted. Still, I'd gotten the interface up and running and the other two students, once instructed, seemed to take flight, cranking through four problems a piece and completing a brief reflection survey I'd attached to the end stage.
Most importantly, I hadn't panicked, abandoning ship out of fear that the students were going to start getting restless.
The experience was helpful, because the first session, which had started at 9, ended 10:30. Each kid took his leave and over the next 10 minutes, the second shift rolled in. I was soon walking another three students through the registration process. Then another three. Then another eight.
Again, with only four laptops to share, I felt the acute urge to cut bait and go with a standard review. By about the 11 a.m. mark, though, I had a critical mass of motivated students working their way through the research/feedback/reflection process, giving me enough time to register each kid both to the class and to Trello. Rather than run the laptops around the room, I eventually selected a "superuser" from each geographical corner of the room, had them invite in their neighbors or, failing that, manage the card/ticket writing process for them.
It wasn't pretty, but it was a pretty good facsimile of what to expect in a regular math classroom. Were some kids bored? Yes. Did more than a few sit idle for the whole 90 minute period? Also, yes. Did a few leave the room in frustration? Maybe.
The ones who got working, however, appeared to be filling out legitimate cards and by 11:30, less than 45 minutes before the end of the session, I found myself in a position where, all I had to do was look at the list of cards in the "waiting for teacher feedback" pile to get an instant sense of who needed help on what? Even better, the students had a visual sense of who was first in line to get the teacher's attention.
Like a lot of educational experiments, this one hovered somewhere in the gray area between out-and-out success and utter disaster. A couple times I was able to deliver a quick review on circle equations, a huge topic on the test, without calling for complete silence or worrying that I was distracting students focused on other topics. As I told the students at least three times, in between thanking them for their patience, this was the ultimate goal: To give each student help on the exact problems that most concerned them. If students chose to take that as a signal to sit and do nothing, that was their choice, I allowed, but a wiser use of the available time would be to look past the problems you knew you could answer and focus on the few problems where you still needed a little help from the teacher.
Perhaps the best indicator of success, however, was the momentum of the second day's session. As soon as I arrived on the floor, I tested the lock on the neighboring computer room and found it
accessible. Writing up quick sign for the classroom, I directed my students to the computer room, where we could each line up behind a monitor and deal with the Trello system individually.
This time around, I had roughly eight students. And while it still took about 30 to 45 minutes to get everybody through the Trello gateway, things were in full productive swing by 10 a.m.. Like an air traffic controller, I was checking off feedback requests almost as soon as they came in. Even better: I reached the point where I could respond to those feedback requests in writing, raising the lexical bar of the conversation, if you will.
Once again, the second sessiondrew almost double the number attendees, including two who never quite managed to get through the Trello signup problems. Both students attributed the impasse to not remembering their gmail passwords (Trello, like a lot of online education apps, appears distinctly biased against accounts bearing a non gmail address, so I had students attempt to re-register through gmail). Part of me felt guilty for letting these students twist in the wind. Then again, another part of me realized that losing track of your email password was the 21st century equivalent to not showing up to class with a pen or pencil.
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