I've had one of those days. Those days where it seems like everything wasn't going your way and you start to wonder if you are able to be in the profession. Those days where you can think of 100 ways it could have gone better but you can't seem to find the few things that went right. After this day happened as soon as I got home I decided to give myself an hour to work out before I started beginning the grind again. I actually use this strategy often, where as soon as I get home I give myself time to just get my mind right. One strategy I hope to use more often is to set an afternoon alarm to make sure I get to bed at an early time. When I have a really bad day sometimes my mind just keeps running and reflecting on what happened and I don't get to bed till way late in the night. This is something I can constantly improve on and will as I get more and more used to the profession.
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I think the hardest part of coming up with a new form of summative assessment is balancing measuring the concepts you want students to learn while also measuring the quality of the product that students give you. I believe most teachers go for a test as a form of summative assessment (at least in math). I know I do. I do this because I know there is little ambiguity in what I am actually measuring. I know for a fact that on question 1, I am trying to see if students know how to solve differential equations. I designed a project for my IM3 class where they needed to use exponential functions to predict how much mortgages and students loans would cost per month, based on what school they went to and what career they predict they were going to have. I also am basing this on where they want to live, etc. Here is where ambiguity comes into play for the final grade. I am measuring whether or not they calculated their student loan payments and mortgage payments based on their exponential functions. That makes up the majority of the project 30/50 points. The other 20 points I am measuring though is the quality of their project, whether or not their sources were valid, the tax brackets they used to determine their monthly income, and so on. This is where I am left with this feeling of am I being fair and what I am measuring. This project covers many standards than just the ones I taught for that given chapter. The chapter I taught we learned about exponential functions and I want to see if they know how to use these to solve real world problems. However, this summative I created is also measuring other standards which I didn't spend the bulk of class time teaching. This is basically the problem that I see, which is why many math teachers have an issue with straying away from the traditional tests. Even if you gave them a set project problem where they are only using one standard to solve a given problem, it is basically doing the same thing as a test but you just gave it the title of project. If you want the project to be more applied and you want students to create something, then you have to have a means of measuring the quality of the product that students are making. Another problem that I myself have as a teacher has to do with the fact that the understanding of students is going to be measured through tests. Whether it is the AP Test, CMAS, PSAT, SAT, all of these are tests that students have to take and that is ultimately how other institutions are going to measure how much they know. This leaves me with two controversial view points. One, I want to have projects in my class where students actually understand how math works and they have fun doing it. However, these projects take way more time than just a standard test and it ultimately is not preparing them for the measurements they will have to take. If I were to give them many test emulating forms of assessment then they will have more experience taking tests and will be more comfortable with the forms of measurement that are used by the state, nation, and colleges. Math is tricky. I believe alternate forms of assessment are good for math classes because it gets the students involved and more willing to actually learn the material. However, there is still the nagging idea in the back of my mind that tells me I'm not preparing them as well as they could be prepared for taking these tests because time they are spending making a cute presentation or project could be used teaching test taking strategies or just getting them more comfortable in a test taking setting. I guess everything has a trade off.
The IRB process was fairly interesting. I really like how the Cayuse system laid it all out for us. I decided to go for exempt for my research project because I was not using anything else outside of the normal classroom setting to gather data. I tried to design my research project around analyzing the data I would have already gathered from the class to begin whether or not I was doing research to make it easier on myself. I already have enough responsibilities as it is and didn't want to add extra things to worry about. Overall I think this submission could have been much more frustrating if it was not for the Cayuse System.
Having a healthy community is one of the most important aspects of the classroom. There are four main components to a successful community within the classroom: Establishing a respectful tone, Establishing a bond with and among your students, Creating a community that values all students, and helping students resolve conflicts. In order to establish a respectful tone in my classroom I make sure that every single student is heard. I also make it a point to not belittle students responses nor ideas that they share within the classroom. I make it a point that all students voices are respected by myself and by their peers in order to ensure that the respectful tone is maintained throughout the classroom. In order to establish a bond with my students and among my students I participate in many extracurricular activities that involved students. I announce all of the home football games and volleyball games for my students. I DJ'd the homecoming dance for my students. I was a volunteer for our home cross country meet that was meant to help raise awareness for cancer. Not only do I participate in all of these activities so that I can acknowledge the achievements and work students put towards other activities outside my classroom, but I also take the time to ask students what they are doing outside of my class. I don't only have these conversations with students one to one, but I will take time out of class to ask students as a group what they did over the weekend or how a game went and so on. This allows students to talk as a group what they were doing and it gives them time to have conversations as a community. I use these same tactics to ensure that all students feel valued. From my rancher students that want to talk about how their cows are doing or what work they did on a vehicle to my student athletes. I take time out of the day to talk about these things with all my students so that they feel valued. I also make sure to acknowledge when students are absent, and I always have a conversation with them about why they were absent and I check in on how they are doing. To help students resolve conflicts I again employ a similar strategy. When students are having troubles in the classroom or even outside of the classroom I always walk them through a thought process. I ask them what is wrong, what are the things they can do to remedy the situation and what are the things they have no power over. I try to stress the point that the things they can't control they need to not stress and worry about. They should put energy and time into the things they can control because that will actually make the difference. I've had a hard time with some of these strategies when it came to one student who is in my AP Calculus class who has missed almost 3 weeks of instruction. When I talk to her about why she missed my class she always just tells me she wanted to sleep in. Then when she comes to class she expects me to teach her all of the material she has missed from not coming to class and gets frustrated when I only spend as much time helping her as I do with all my other students. This used to tick me off and when she would throw snide remarks at how I am biased towards the other students I would just respond with "the reason you are struggling is because you have missed x days of class, all of these other students have had that much more practice over you, you can't just expect to miss hours upon hours of class and make it up in 30 minutes. I am going to give you the same amount of help as all of these other students." That usually didn't go over well and she would just shut down in my class and not do anything. Recently I had a one on one conversation with her about how I was worried about how much class she has missed and that we will set up a time after school where she can come in and get extra help on what she has missed. It turns out that after a week of this I found out that she was really frustrated and sad because she thought I was judging her for missing my class. I explained to her that I wasn't judging her, I was just worried that she wouldn't be successful if she kept missing my class and didn't take the time to make it up. But as we've been working together this week, her mathematical skills have gotten better and I believe we are at a point where she thinks she can do the material. She still misses my classes in the morning often...but one baby step at a time I suppose.
I've tried using Kahoots as an exit ticket for my students in my Integrated Math III class. I liked use it because it gave me some instant feedback on how well my class as a whole has learned the material. This makes it really nice for me as the teacher because I don't have a million things to grade and I have a general idea of where everyone is. What I don't like about these types of apps is I have no way to see the students work. Therefore, I don't really know what part of the material they are struggling with. Are they struggling with the algebraic manipulation or do they not know how to set up the problem to begin with? The other problem I run into is the lack of technology access my students have. Not all of my students have access to chrome books or laptops. Also not all of my students have access to smart phones. I think about my Integrated Math 3 class. In that class alone I have 4 kids that are still using flip phones and they also did not purchase a chrome book at the end of the year. This can be frustrating when it comes to trying to implement a tech based formative assessment. I usually deal with this by just making paper copies of the formative and giving it to them. This problem is extending to my summative assessment as well, because it requires them to write up a financial plan. It also requires them to find resources online. I've been requesting time for the computer lab for this class, this ensures that everyone in the class has access to a computer. In the future I think I will try to incorporate google forms as another form of assessment.
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December 2019
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