December 2020 – Educational Aspirations

Student feedback and goal setting have been different this school year. The students that I teach have been learning from home and in the classroom. The district has moved back and forth between remote and hybrid models since August. Students have recently been back in the classroom and and it’s not possible to use shared paper materials. This has been one of the most challenging problems this year. Therefore I’ve needed to rely on digital means for instruction and manipulatives. This has impacted how students receive feedback and set goals.

I’ve been using Desmos more than ever since my lessons are digital. It has pushed me to find ways to use the platform so students think more critically about math. Through the process I’ve learned more about how to create better tasks that enable students to reflect on their math work. I’ve found so much support from the Twitter Desmos community. I’ve slowly been learning more about Desmos CL and how to incorporate it into my decks so students are able to process the concepts they discover and receive feedback. I started using CL more frequently after reading Julie’s fantastic post. For the past month or so I’ve been working on creating self-checking tasks with small wins here and there. Last week I found a recipe that has been somewhat successful for formative checkpoints. I used it with a few different classrooms last week with multiple choice questions.

Here’s how it goes. Students synchronously complete a list of multiple choice questions related to a specific skill. I added the sketch pad for students to show their work and used teacher pacing to make sure students only have access to the question slides.

Once students finish the questions they visit a slide where they’re asked to reflect on the questions. They also draw on the sketch pad how they think they performed. During this time students revisit the questions in order to make an accurate prediction.

Then the final slide opens indicating correct/incorrect answers. The prior slide is copied over and students reflect on their performance compared to the estimate.

The student responses comparing their results to the prediction were stellar. Afterwards, the class had a conversation about the questions that were more challenging than others and why those stood out. I’m hoping to expand on this idea in January.

Feel free to use/copy/change the activity. It can be found here.

Like many teachers, I had remote parent teacher conferences recently. It was a different experience for sure as mine have always been in-person or over the phone. I’d say around 80 – 90% of my conferences are usually scheduled on back to school night in August and parents come into the school in November to discuss their child’s progress. This year was obviously different. Based on a recommendation from my school and team I decided to utilize a sign-up genius this year. It was fairly seamless and my parents were able to sign up without much trouble. Each parent signed up for a 10 minute slot to discuss their child’s math progress. Ten minutes can go in a flash during conferences so I tried to organize as much in advance as possible. In the past I’ve tried to include student reflections as part of the process and I wanted to do the same with our Zoom-ified conferences this year. I used this Desmos deck.

Students started to complete the card sort about a week before conferences by reflecting on their progress and determining which skill fit a category. Students reviewed their Canvas/SeeSaw history and analyzed their work compared to the standard. I gave class time for students to complete the Desmos task.

As the individual conferences proceeded I brought up the above screen and mentioned that this is the student’s perspective and we’ll discuss how accurate that perception is compared to what I’m seeing in the classroom and work that’s being produced. As I went through the categories I moved or kept the skills in place. The good news is that most of the skills were in accurate categories. When change was needed it tended to be one column over.

I then spoke with the parent about additional opportunities to address certain skills. Each grade level had a different screen in one Desmos deck.

This made it easier to move through each screen with the parent as one session ended and and a new parent entered the waiting room. I also used the advanced zoom function to make the slide as large as possible for a parent to see as some were on phones during the conference.

The conference time went quickly and by the time we finished that slide time was up. The conference were completely digital and I’m hoping that this might be something we consider as an option moving forward.