Word Problems and Math

Last year, after attending the Singapore Math workshop, I was motivated to have the students complete a POD (problem of the day) on a daily basis. After a while of having a problem for them to complete every day, somehow I stopped doing it with them. I don’t know whether it was my fault because I was trying to accomplish more “book work” or seeing the dread on the students’ faces that made me stop the practice. (The word problems in the book can be very difficult, so if I had to guess, it was me taking the easy way out.)
I began this year, motivated once again to do word problems, but one again stopped. I spend much more time practicing and reviewing learned skills doing math minutes with the students. I think this was a valuable task because for the first time in my career, when the students had to recall how to do a skill there was very little reteaching required; however, I knew the students needed to practice with word problems because isn’t that how we use math in the “real world”?
I recently started, once again, with word problems and I am encouraging the students to use the Singapore method which involves: creating a title for the problem, model drawing, solving, and a sentence explaining the answer.
At first, the students balked with the idea of all of the steps, so I decided to make it more “fun” to solve the problem using the steps. Through the years, students haven’t changed. They still love to write on the board and play teacher, so now I let four students come up to the board and fill in the steps and explain the word problem. For some reason this has been a hit!
I know it is my responsibility to help the students use their math skills in a real world way and I am trying. Now all I need to do is find better word problems that are more meaningful, and less boring, for the students. Why do all word problems have to be so meaningless? Does any one have any good websites or books for great word problems?

Student-Led Conferences-April 19, 2013

For all of my frustration, anxiety, and other mental disorders that I was going through the last two weeks, I can now breathe a deep sigh of relief. As always, the students rose to the occasion and I felt like a proud mother on Friday. All of their hard work paid off and the conferences went off without a hitch. (Even the internet cooperated!)
There are still things that I would like to do differently. The first one is that the students continued to sound scripted when they shared their reflections. I want the students to be able to talk to their parents, not read to them. The second thing is that I need to change the prep time. The first week, we spent an hour or so a day preparing. This week we dedicated three full days during General Studies time. Stephanie and I decided not to change classes Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and we used those days to prepare the students. This method worked the best. When the students and I were reflecting about the process, they said it was much easier to work two or three full days rather than an hour or so a day.
As for what I personally need to do differently I had a major issue with myself. I tended to forget that the parents, and another teacher, were also present. I caught myself not talking or making eye contact with them and directing all of my attention to the students. I need to make the parents and colleagues more a part of the conferencing process. I also need to figure out a way to keep the parents more engaged. Silvia was an observer for most of the day and she noticed that some of the parents did not seem involved in the conference. I need to do more research and see how other teachers tackle this problem.
With that said, I was pleased with the students’ ability to set goals and self-reflect. I cannot imagine doing conferences any other way now. They truly owned their learning.
To read the students’ reflections, visit their blogs where their presentations are posted.

Teacher-Led Conference

Teacher-Led Conference:
Shelly Zavon
When I was helping my students prepare for the Student-Led Conferences in April, I asked them to go back and reflect on their previous goals they set in November. That to me, was the most important task they did for the SLC. Have they made progress in Fifth Grade? Were they growing as a student (not compared to others, but individually.)?

When I was thinking about how to prepare for my own conference, me being me, I asked everyone in around me to give me suggestions on how to present my 2012-2013 school year to administrators. Andrea Hernandez suggested that I tie my accomplishments this year to my Professional Development plan that we created together in August and Silvia Tolisano gave me the idea to link my teaching to the Learning Target wheels and discuss my movement through the sections of the rubric that the learning committee had developed.

The objective of my professional development plan for this year was:
“To continue to evolve to a more-student centered classroom (using strategies from Alan November)”
“To implement student-led conferences using Blogfolios”
The Growth Plan was:
Experiment with the role of “scribe” who will share tutorials /reviews of math lessons
•Set learning goals with students
• Continue to model reflective learning for students and colleagues
• Prepare 5th graders to lead their own parent-teacher-STUDENT conferences
• Research and connect with other educators implementing student-led conferences
• Document and share your experiences on the Ning (and professional blog?)

Reflections:
~Did I meet my goals?
Yes and no.
Yes, I did implement SLC’s in November and in April and yes they did use their student blogs to create and post their SLC presentations.
Yes, I did set learning goals with the students. Not only did I do this but I asked the LA teacher and Jewish Studies teachers to do the same for each Fifth Grade student.
*I also had each student set learning goals for themselves in November and April.
Yes, I continued to model reflective learning with my colleagues; however, I was not so outwardly reflective with my students. I would often say we need to “back up” and redo some activities, but as far as visibly (as in writing on the class blog) no, I did not do this.
Yes, I did do research when planning to implement the SLC’s and I often collaborated with Andrea. She was a great help to me with this and she always shared any research and examples she would find on this topic.
But, no, I did not connect with other educators implementing student-led conferences.
Yes, I did document and share my experiences on the Ning. I also led a session discussing SLC’s at our faculty’s “Edcamp” in January.
I did create a professional blog :Teacher 21
*One accomplishment of the year was that in 4th and 5th Grade Social Studies I worked collaboratively with Karin Hallett and helped the students develop research skills.
First, we did a project on the presidential election process.
The students were taught to find reputable websites, bookmarking skills (using Diigo) and persuasive writing skills which were used to create a speech for a given candidate.
Second, the 4th grade will publish an e-book focusing on Fort Caroline and 5th grade an e-book on Roanoke-The Lost Colony. This proved to be a very time-consuming project; however, the learning that took place was phenomenal. The students learned to research and find reputable websites, make citations for websites and texts using an abbreviated MLA style, summarize, and reflect. (e-book coming)
My biggest NO for the year is that I could never implement the idea of a “class scribe” for the blog. I tried on several occasions to have students create a tutorial for a concept in math. It failed miserably. The students were unable to share their knowledge effectively and I did not post their work on the blog.

*In the future, I must have the entire class practice making tutorials then have the “most capable” become the scribes in hopes that the others will learn from them how to create a good tutorial.

My Movement on the Five Wheels of the Learning Target:

Image citation:

http://langwitches.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MJGDS-LearningTarget-2.jpg

**At our meeting I will share with you the PDF file of the Learning Target rubric where I annotated my progress
MJGDS-Learning-Target-1
I. Learning Environment
II. Assessment-Area of weakness
III. Role of Teacher-Area of weakness
IV. Amplification
V. Task

I reviewed the MJGDS learning target (see PDF) and made notes in the columns where I think my teaching is now and if I am making movement into the next column.

I have realized that I am functioning mostly in the second and third column on the rubric so there is a lot of room for improvement.
I didn’t realize that I was at such a low level (1st column of rubric) in several sections under role of teacher and assessments until I went back and truly reflected what is going on in my classroom.

My New Goals for Teaching:
~Providing choices for students
~Providing more (differentiated) learning environment for students-“Daily 5 for Math” is something I want to research for next year
~Expand assessments past paper and pencil tests (especially in Math)
~Improve amplification by connecting with other educators (outside of our school) and collaborating with them ie lessons/projects
~Reach out and connect to a global audience (Twitter/class blog/professional blog)
~Change classroom environment to include more student generated work on walls and obtain furniture that is easily rearranged for better learning atmosphere
~Make sure that the students “own the learning” and have opportunity to create their own experiences that are authentic and relate to the “real world”
~Implementation of the 1:1 ipad pilot program for the 2013-2015 school years
~Use more online resources such as Pinterest to enhance teaching activities
~Read and comment on at least two educational blogs as often as possible

Critiquing Student Work

http://www.olaalaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/success-quotes-thoughts-winston-churchill-ability-failure-enthusiasm.jpg

In Fifth Grade, we are finishing an ebook about Roanoke that we have been working on for several months now.
Karin and I collaborated on this and we have been team teaching the unit from the beginning. After the topic of Roanoke was discussed in class, the students met with Karin and brainstormed different topics about Roanoke that they wanted to research.

Ideas and Topics:

• How Long Did the Journey Take?
• What Happened to the Colony?
• Croatoan: Coincidence or Curse?
• Interesting Theories
• Who Led the English Colony? Why Did The English Sail to Find New Land?
• What happened to the colonists when White returned to England?
• Native Americans: Friends or Foes?
• Surviving Roanoke (Food? Life in general? Clothing? Shelter? etc.)

For next step, we let the students choose what they wanted to research (with a little help from us).
Then came the step of actually putting to use what we had taught the students during the unit on the election process. We asked them to search for good websites, bookmark with Diigo, and take notes, which the students did on a Google Doc, so we could all collaborate.
This week, I felt it was time to conference and critique the research that the students had done. A deadline was set and all research was to be completed and ready to present to the class. In other words, a final draft was due.
During the class, we (the class included) went through each student’s work, and Karin and I made suggestions how they could improve their drafts. A lot of the students began to argue with us about the corrections we were asking them to make. Some even made the statement that we, Karin and I, said they had done a good job on past occasions, so they saw no reason to make the new corrections. We tried to explain to the students that a good writer is always trying to improve their writing and that sometimes, the second or third time you read something, you may have ideas to make it better that you didn’t think of earlier. The students were still very upset that we didn’t tell them how “great” a job we thought they had done.
Now here is my question. Why are today’s students so reluctant to constructive criticism? Karin and I were not being punitive when we asked them the go back into their draft and make it the best it can be, were we?
We are planning to publish the ebook and it will be on itunes so we both feel that everything must be perfect and we explained this to the students.
At the end of the session, we made another assignment for the students to go back and correct their work one last time and we gave them two more days. Eight out of eleven students did not bother to do this. I wrote down all of the names of the students who did not do the assignment and made the announcement that points were going to be deducted from their final grade. At that point, the students decided it would be a good idea to cooperate.
Are children today used to only being praised? Are they not expected to learn how to deal with criticism? Maybe Shana is right. Why do we feel the necessity to praise and reward the losers as well as winners? Why can’t students understand that everything they do is not always going to result in a teacher saying, “Good job!” or given an “A” on the assignment?
People are not perfect and we must teach our students that they don’t always do a great or even acceptable job. We must teach accountability or we will raise a bunch of adults who are unable to accept failure. Maybe we should have a sign in each classroom that has the saying, “Failure is the mother of success” so each day the students know it is okay not to know how to do it all. We are ALL learning ALL of the time.
What did I learn from this experience? That I must not only teach the curriculum, but I must teach students to accept the fact that I am not doing my job if I don’t point out mistakes and try to help them to always make their work the best it can be, even if it is not for a global audience. I am not doing the children any favors by praising work where it is not justified.

Image Credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/holeshotstudio/6256654617/

A Total Reflection

This week I had the honor of being interviewed by a woman named Chana Stiefel. In her initial email to me she wrote the following message:

I’m writing a case study for Yeshiva University about Ed Tech and 21st c schools. I’m hoping I can set up a time to interview you to get the perspective of a teacher who has witnessed the transformation and culture change.

Chana called me Thursday morning and we talked for almost an hour about MJGDS. For me, it was a trip down memory lane.
To begin with she asked me what it was like my first year here, which was also the year that Andrea started here too. We talked about how I, and most everyone else on the faculty, was excited and apprehensive about having our own laptops. I shared with her that I had next to no experience with computers.
We talked about how for the first few years that Andrea was here we had computer classes where Andrea would take out classes and teach skills and do projects with the students.
We then discussed the year that Silvia arrived and how she and Andrea began to transform our school into a modern learning institution.
I reminisced about one of first faculty meetings with Silvia there was an uproar when each faculty and staff member was told they had to have a school email address. It was at that point in my conversation with Chana that I realized how far we have actually come with our school.
Next, Chana asked me what happened when Jon arrived. I reflected back to that time and I said what I had felt three years ago and still feel today. He had and has a vision for our school and we will and are going to be that school.
During the phone call I realized that we are a role model for other schools. We have progressed from being a traditional learning-style school to a modern learning institution and I am so proud to be a part of the transformation that has and is taking place. However, I realized that I can’t just talk the talk. I feel that I need to grow so much more in order to be a “real” member of the modern learning team. So many days I slip back and take the easy way out and assign workbook pages and give “book-made” tests. Once again, I feel like a hypocrite. I must have more than a couple of days a week when I feel that I am really teaching and challenging my students. This is the hard part. It is easy to talk about how wonderful we all are. The difficult part is actually doing it.
I did realize that we have made a lot of headway. At the end of the conversation Chana told me how she was going to write about a fictional school that is trying to transform into a 21st century school and she said something like, “So really all a school needs is a principal who is willing to be on board, a go to person who knows about technology, and classroom blogs.”
I had to laugh and think to myself we HAVE come such a long way from this mindset. It is hard to articulate what’s needed to get where we are today, but as I told her, that’s a start.

“Sixth Sense”

Do you sometimes feel like you have a sixth sense when you are teaching? I am talking about that nonverbal reaction that you can feel from your students when you are teaching and at certain moments during the lesson you just KNOW they get the concept.
This happened to me the other day when I was teaching a lesson dealing with adding fractions with uncommon denominators.
I was trying to explain the “why” we have to change the denominators before you can add fractions and I had said over and over the example explaining how you can’t compare apples to oranges. Not a good comparison to use with lower school math students.
So I drew a pizza on the board and shared it with imaginary kids and voila, it clicked.
I could see that they finally understood WHY you have to change the fraction to an equivalent fraction. I explained that if your pizza is cut into eighths, you couldn’t take a sixth of a piece away since it is cut into eighths. I showed them that first you have to find an equivalent fraction. I also used fractions strips to enforce the concept.
The next day, I used a drawing of a candy bar and said the same thing and once again everything seemed to make sense to them.
Now, putting everything together is the challenge. We started adding fractions with unlike denominators (with simplifying) and it was like I was speaking a foreign language again. They seem to be having difficulty putting all of the steps together.
So, back to the drawing board. Does anyone have any good ideas for this skill other than repetition? I sure would appreciate any help.

“How’d I Do?”

That is the question I kept hearing over and over last Friday with it being report card day. It seems like that wouldn’t be a question anymore with my students since my grades are posted weekly on Headmaster, but it is.
So I started thinking, how have I done over the last nine weeks? If I got a report card what grades would I receive?
The first nine weeks ended with a bang. Student led conferences went so well and I was on a “teaching high”! Then came Thanksgiving break, Winter break, and the inevitable January blues. Before I knew it the nine weeks was over and I felt that I hadn’t accomplished as much as I did the first semester.
So I have been doing some soul searching to see what I have accomplished.
The question that always goes through my mind is am I giving my students “real” learning experiences? I hope the answer is yes. In math we have been working on a unit dealing with fractions. I have tried to ALWAYS tell my math students WHY I am teaching the skill to them. We talked about candy bars and pizza. We talked about paint cans and juice cartons and the list goes on and on. I really don’t know if any of them will ever have to figure out the exact fractional amount of a can of paint that they have used on a given day, but you never know. The good thing is, the Fourth and Fifth graders can add and subtract fractions like crazy AND they understand what a fraction actually represents. This is the best thing about Singapore Math…it helps the student to understand what things are and why we do certain math operations the way we do.
The best “real world” experience that we did this nine weeks was the “Class Store”. This is where the students can cash in their money that they earned for good behavior, doing homework, etc. We have a cashier and a secretary that keeps track of the student’s spending while they are shopping. It is a wonderful, exciting, happy, and authentic learning experience for the kids. They learn the value of a dollar and how to budget and save for something they want to buy. (Test passes are always in demand, but are the most expensive item!)
So how have I done this nine weeks? I haven’t been as productive or creative as the first nine weeks, so I guess I will say “satisfactory”. So now I need to get going again by reading more blogs to get new and innovative ideas and bring my grade up to a “good” for the third nine weeks. Wish me luck!

“Let’s Work Together”

Ok, so I am showing my age, but that is the song that I kept thinking of this week. The question I kept asking myself was, “how can a teacher NOT collaborate with other teachers?”
Back in the 70’s when I first started teaching, we would collaborate with other faculty about reports that had to be completed, schedules, and other non-teaching matters. To ask for help was a sign of weakness and a cause for the principal to come down to your room for an observation. I quickly learned NEVER to ask for help or ideas form others. Please remember, this was before Pinterest and Google, so in order to get ideas, you had to rely on store bought idea books that were probably NOT written by teachers. Creativity was often at a standstill.
As I reflected last week, I had hit a lull with my enthusiasm and creativity over the past few weeks. So, I had to bare my soul to Silvia and Andrea and confess that I really needed some help and guidance. As usual, they were there for me and gave me the boost that I needed to proceed with newfound energy.
Here’s what we “cooked up” together:
Silvia and I are collaborating with the Fifth Grade with a project on Jamestown. We started brainstorming with them on Thursday about different ideas. (Of course, we sort of led them in a direction that we had been thinking about going.) What an exciting discussion we had with the students. The students verbalized that the project had to be great because as on student stated, “We work for the world now!” The best thing that happened was one of my boys said, “This was the best Social Studies class, ever!” That did it. I was energized to continue.
The other problem was that I was at mental “low ebb” with my math classes. I had shared this feeling with Andrea and she started doing some searching and shared some fantastic ideas with me. One idea was so simple, but I had never thought of it. You give the students a number and have them create a word problem that gives that number as the answer. I did the exercise with my Fourth Grade and some of the word problems they created were fantastic. On the other hand, I saw some weaknesses in other students that I had not noticed before, such as basic understanding of putting an equation together.
The other idea, which I intend to try next week, is at the end of a math lesson, have the students create an equation for the skill you taught. Have them put it on a stickie note and place it on the wall on the way out of the room. This is a quick assessment as to who understood the lesson and who didn’t. Amazing idea!
Andrea also found a website that describes how teachers can incorporate the idea of the “Daily 5” into the math curriculum. I can’t wait to try this idea next year.
I am once again motivated and excited to teach thanks to the collaboration with other professionals. How did I ever surviving teaching before in the “dark ages”?

“Keep on Swimming”

This week Fifth Grade accomplished (and learned) a lot. Silvia and I are collaborating on a project comparing the pioneers of Jamestown to the pioneers of the digital world. (I wish I could take credit for the idea, but it is all Silvia.)
The class met with Silvia and began brainstorming the idea. The first meeting began with trying to create a KWHLAQ chart. We got as far as the K category and realized that we needed to back up with the students. They really didn’t completely understand the idea of comparing the two categories.
The next class meeting, we gave the students a prompt which was “I am an explorer in the digital world, just as John Smith was an explorer in the new world.”

We had the students open a shared Google Doc and write based on the prompt. Silvia and I were also writing on the doc using the same prompt. When later looking over the students’ work, it was interesting to see the different levels of thinking that were going on in the class. Most understood the prompt and made good points, but there were others who wrote only one sentence and were writing to one another about the Jaguars. Yes, the Jaguars. This really opened my eyes as to what goes on when I think that my students are busy working when I make an assignment.
On Friday, the Fifth Grade went to the library to work with Karin on their e-book that will be about Roanoke. So this time when they were working on their Google docs I was going on their docs at the same time and reading what they were writing as they were working. What a difference in quality my (digital) presence made! Why haven’t I thought of doing this before? They were shocked when I would say, “I think you need to go back and cite where you got your information.” Or, “Is this your opinion or a fact based on your research?” I have never had such a productive class when using the laptops.

I am hoping that the Jamestown project will come together soon. The idea is good; I just need to find a way to help the students dig deeper and start thinking on a higher level. For some reason, the students don’t like to be challenged to go to the next level. They want to do everything quickly and get to the fun part, which hopefully in this case will result in a music video.
With both of these projects, the students have had to move to a more advanced level of critical thinking (and accountability). I know this has been good for them, but is has been a grueling process for us teachers. I keep thinking, “learning is messy” and as Dory said in Finding Nemo, “Keep on swimming, swimming, swimming.”