Am I Becoming a Digital Luddite?

So I have spent some time working on this blog today. I needed to add a page for workshop information since I don't want to continue using random Google Docs for that purpose. It is surprising how much time I waste trying to find stuff I made because I am too lazy to organize it.

I updated my About Me information on my class blog, Mr. C's Class Blog, and then copied/pasted it in a new page here. It seems like I just updated it but I still had lots to add. I also added My Teaching Manifesto to this blog since this is where I plan on keeping all my professional stuff.

As I see all the digital tools that are being used (and I found a bunch of new ones from my research for my session Friday at the Joplin Technology Summit on useful digital tools) I keep thinking there is just too much new stuff. I used to be able to keep up with the new tools. Of course it wasn't too long ago a new digital tool only came out every month or two. It seems like there are new ones weekly, if not daily, now.

Do teachers who are new to online digital tools have the advantage of no online baggage? Will my inability to move from platform to platform hold me back? Am I becoming a Digital Luddite?

(By the way, I didn't originate the phrase digital luddite, but I was unaware it was 'a thing' before I used it. Ain't Google searches grand!) 

Whispersync for Voice

 If you love to read, and by reading I mean reading or listening to books being read to you, hen you should know about Whispersync for Voice. The gist is if you own a Whispersync for Voice enabled ebook and audio book from Audible.com they will sync up as you read through them. For example, if you read the ebook and get into the car and turn on the audio book, it will sync to where you stopped reading the ebook. It works really well and is a very nice perk, but it isn't what makes this such a great deal.

In the picture below you can see where the book The Name of the Wind is Whispersync for Voice ready. Notice the ebook is $8.99.

In the picture below you see the same book on Audible.com where the price is now only $3.99 instead of the member price of $22.04. This means you can get both books for $13 which is quite the savings over just buying the audio book. 

Even more impressive is the price of A Tale of Two Cities below. I 'bought' the ebook for free on Amazon and can get the audio book for only $1! If you like audio books or use them in your classroom, you should definitely take a look at this promotion. 

It Would Have Been More Fun If It Was Figuring Out a Trip for Us: Mr. C, What Is a Real World Scenario Part 2

The students finished figuring out the expenses to my baseball trip in July yesterday. Depending on the price of hotel and tickets it will cost between $1,000 an d$1,100 dollars for a three day trip. Apparently you need to be a major league baseball player to afford going to back to back to back games :(

After the students all shared their totals I asked them if they liked the activity. I had two very interesting responses from two different students. One student asked me if I liked the activity. I told them I really enjoyed their enthusiasm for the project. Another student then told me that she would have liked the assignment more if it had been a trip she wanted to go on. (This is what we in education circles call a teachable moment ;) So we immediately started making plans for a trip they will research.

I gave them some guidelines to help them:

• The trip would be five days long. We picked a week in July so they wouldn't miss summer school :)
• I told them they needed to budget $75 a day for food per person.
• I also had them spend $50 a day on souvenirs. 

I learned a lot in just the first day:

• Several students planned the trip around a real trip they are going to take later this year.
• Many students wanted to plan the trip together so they could share the experience (although I don't know if they want to share the actual trip or just the planning.)
• Most of my students have a very limited view of where they can go on vacation. I had to emphasize many times that they could go anywhere for those five days. Money was not an issue. Most still tried to find bargains with their hotels. 
• Many of the students wanted to visit relatives that don't live nearby. Isn't that wonderful!

The reality is this has been a great way to get our minds off of test prep for a few days and get them engaged and rejuvenated for math. 

Mr. C, What Is a Real World Scenario?

"Mr. C, what is a real world scenario?" asked Stephanie. This question yesterday caused me to completely change today's math lesson. Instead of more test prep/review which we have been doing, I decided we needed to do something different.

I have been really excited about baseball this year, probably more excited than I have been in 25 years when the Royals were really good. After reading about the Edutour I checked the baseball schedule at KC to see if the tour stop coincided with a home stand. Yes, that was a random thought but that is how I roll.

I then had the inspiration to see if there were a way to get to meet Nick and Tim and combine that with a couple games. I noticed that the Royals had a home game the day before the pit stop and then I looked at the Cardinals schedule and found they were also playing a home stand at that time. I could do back to back games in different stadiums! Next I checked the Chicago Cubs schedule, but they were playing away at that time but the White Sox had a home stand then too. I could actually pull of three games in three different stadiums in three days!

Of course when I approached my wife with this all she wanted to know was how much it was going to cost. Seriously, I am excited about the stars aligning like a sign from heaven and she just wants to know about the Benjamins! I knew I was going to have to figure out what it would cost to do make the trip. Can you imagine what I decided to do? Yup, I created a real world scenario!

Today in math I told the students about how I wanted to make this trip and I gave them the dates of the games. I told them I wanted them to figure out how much it would cost me to go. I gave them the following data to use:

• I estimated gas in July at $4 per gallon.
• I estimated my car's miles per gallon at 25 .
• I told them I wanted to stay in each city after the game at a hotel.
• I told them I wanted the hotel to cost no more than $80 a night.
• I estimated I would spend $100 a day for food.
• I estimated I would need $70 a game for souvenirs. 
• I told them I wanted 2 tickets for each game. 
• I told them I wanted the seats to be on the bottom deck and not way out in the outfield.

We went into the computer lab and they got started. As they worked I gave them advice such as using maps.google.com to find the driving distances between the cities and how I really enjoyed staying at the  hotels in the Choice chain. Not all of them took my advice and I noticed a lot of different online tools being used to get the information they needed. How cool is that?

I spent an hour today running from student to student (ok, I was actually slowly sauntering) helping them pick out good seats, okaying or nixing their choice in hotels, looking at Google Earth images of the different ballparks, and in general answering the small questions that come up with this type of activity. 

Things I noticed during the class:

• The kids were asking good questions like "Do you want a free breakfast at your hotel?" and "How far away are you willing to stay from the baseball stadium?"
• The normal loud social buzz that my class seems to thrive on this time was centered around the task. That is a big #eduwin for my students. 
• A few times I caught myself thinking that my students sounded like professional travel agents.
• Everyone was engaged and most were really excited. 
• There are a lot of hotels around the baseball stadiums.

They Had to Fail to Prepare for Success

I am observing my class work on an assignment due yesterday. They spent 4+ days pretending to do what they were supposed to. I say pretending because they obviously (today) weren't prepared to share. For all intents, they failed. The obvious question is "Why?"

I am sure that the responsibility lies with me. I intentionally keep my mitts off the students work. If they ask questions I send them to other students to have them answered. Typically this works very well. It requires the students to get over their fear of asking others for help (others who are not the adult in charge.) It didn't work this time because none of the groups really understood what to do.

It wasn't that they were not capable or that I didn't show them (several times). Their problem is they excel at school so much they don't know that they can't figure it out even when they aren't really paying attention. Basically they get started before they hear the instructions and assume they can figure it out.

I have known this and yet I am still surprised by the failure. I could have lost it; I could have blown up. I didn't, instead I redirected them to work and now I am watching them finally work together like they should have done in the beginning. I suppose they had to fail to prepare for success.  I guess the next question (or extension as I call it in science) is 'Will they remember this or will they repeat it?'

This post was inspired by @Philip_Cummings's post: Asking for Help

Lunch Project Days 6-10

I haven't forgotten the project, we have just been working through a bit of the drudgery. The first thing we had to do this week is get our survey and instructions created. I wrote the instructions intending for them to sound like the instructions students during our high stakes test. I was hoping the tone would convey to the students the survey was important and they would then take it more seriously.

Link to the Instructions

Instructions to be read to the students taking the school lunch survey.

Thank you for participating in our lunch program study. The survey that will be handed out has a list lunch choices. These are actual lunch choices that have been given this year. You will look at all of the lunch choices and then pick your favorites.

You will assign your most favorite choice to #1, your second favorite choice to #2 and so on. When you have chosen your top ten favorite choices you are finished with the survey.

You must be silent from the time we hand out the survey until everyone is finished. If you or anyone in the room talks during the survey, it may become invalid and the whole groups’ surveys may be thrown away. Are there any questions?

At the top of the survey you need to write your grade on the line next to the word ‘Grade’.  I am going to hand out the survey now, please write ______(grade) as soon as you receive it. You may begin as soon as you write the grade number on your paper.

(Make sure you circulate the room and check that the correct grade is entered.) (If there is any talking during the survey, note what the speaker says so we can decide if the survey is compromised when you bring it back.)

The survey included all of the items that had been offered over the period we looked at. The students read the instructions and then handed out the surveys.

Link to the Survey

We discussed the number of surveys we needed to take to get a good 'sample'. Many of the students wanted to survey every student in the school. I explained how impractical it would to be survey all 360+ students. I convinced them that getting 20 surveys at each grade level would be enough, that is still 120! I think after having to go through the surveys they would agree.

One of the things I wanted the students who gave the survey to watch out for was students sharing their choices aloud. I really stressed to the students before they gave out the surveys the need to emphasize to the students they should not talk while the survey was being filled out. Interestingly, we actually had two classrooms where one or more students 'shared' what they were choosing during the survey. We decided to throw out those surveys and give another survey to a different class. 

We spent three days collecting the surveys, working around the schedules of each classroom. This week we will finish going through those surveys and on Wednesday the plan is to aggregate the datum. 

Why Blogging Isn't Transformational for Our Students Yet

Dr. Chris McGee wrote a blog post wrote a post on his blog Coaching in and out of the Classroom on the importance of blogging. It helped me verbalize some thoughts that had been swimming through my head for some time:

There are many things more important than blogging, especially how it is often used in the classroom. As you know I argue that blogging and other forms of social media have the potential to be transformative when they are used to connect students with others around the world. Unfortunately this isn't the norm of blogging or social media use by our students. 

When teachers refer to authentic audience they often confuse it with a larger audience. Authenticity means that the readers want to read the writing. They choose it, they don't have it chosen for them (even when they are assigned to do it through comments4kids). We don't develop authentic audiences with our students because that requires we give up control of where the students go and what they read.  

If we want blogging and commenting to be transformative we have to let students choose to blog, choose to respond, and choose to not participate. Then the power of connections can truly transform our students thinking. I truly believe that connections made by future generations online will help bring about a more peaceful and caring world, the question is will educators lead the way or will we continue to stifle it through our lack of understanding?

What do you think? Is this right or am I full of crap? I would love some dialogue about this.

Interesting Student Observation About Peter Pan

While discussing the movie Peter Pan (2003) I asked the question, "Why is Mr. Darling and Hook always played by the same actor?"

One of my students came up with a brilliant observation. He said that because Mrs. Darling had given her secret kiss (read the book Peter and Wendy) to Peter, Peter was jealous of Mr. Darling and imagined him as the villain of Neverland.

If that is the only thing any of my students discover during our year long project, it will have been totally worthwhile! This is why sharing a long term project is so valuable, students have opportunities to revisit information and draw conclusions. Here is a link to our project. 

Lunch Project Day 5

Today was a turning point day, after we figured out the mean, median, mode, and range for each choice  we discovered that the first choice (average) was picked 62% while the second choice was picked 24%, the third 7% and 8% on average brought their lunch. There was a large discrepancy between the ranges of the first and second choices, while the third and fourth choices were very consistent.

After we discussed that I decided to let them think about where we need to go next, this is where I got into trouble. Instead of making a statement that steered them into one direction, I left it too open ended. I had that deer in the head lights stare looking at me. Then everybody had an idea, but it was about changing specific items or how often items were on the menu. None of which we can control, especially since we have no data showing that a large number of students care.

I decided to take over the show and pick an activity we could do to gather more data that could be used for decisions they wanted to make. I didn't want to do it, but they simply aren't ready to understand what is needed to move to through the process. In retrospect I should have had them think about the project overnight and come up with a plan of action to be submitted in the morning. While I don't think most would have come up with something, there might have been a few who did and because I didn't give them time to think about it I won't ever find out.

To tie the math we are doing with science I pulled out my old standard the steps of the scientific method. I identified the problem, we don't know what entrees the students like the most. We came up with a plan. We will survey a random sampling of the students. We decided that sampling 20 students per grade level will give us enough information to work from. Tomorrow we write the survey and the instructions the students will give when they administer it.

Because I made a mistake and didn't let my students attempt to come up with a plan of their own, I have decided that after this survey is complete the students will come up with an extension that they can follow up with based upon the information we receive. Hopefully this will engage a few of the students to really think of something interesting for us to do next.

I can think of a few things they could choose to do next:

• They can come up with a new menu with different choices.
• They can create a petition for the students to sign that addresses the choices that were liked least.
• They could survey the kids to see what choices are liked least. 
• They could research the nutritional value of the top 10 choices to see if they are healthy enough to want to eat.
• They could design vegetarian or vegan entrees to be added. (This may seem strange, but there was a lot of discussion about vegetarianism and veganism this week.)

Maybe This Is Why We Don't Share Our Failures

Photo by RusselDavis

I presented a session at METC on students creating video reflections. As you can (if you know me at all) imagine the emphasis was less on the technology, more on what the students were reflecting. I also spent a large percentage of the time discussing my mistakes and failures throughout the process.

Today I received the feedback from the session. These are the two comments that I received:

Terribly boring. No new information. Hardly any technology.

The presenter showed us examples of video reflections but they weren't good examples. He even admitted that they were bad! No instruction was given on how to record the videos or how to upload them. He also didn't share how these reflections could be an instructional tool but just a fun project. I wish this session went deeper and was more meaningful and applicable.

No wonder so few choose to share their failures.

The Lunch Project Day 4

Here are the observations that some of the students made after looking through yesterday's datum:

• Francisco: Chicken patties are selected >80% each Wednesday
• Jace: 'Brought' stayed between 5-10%;
• Nicole: Salads range between 3-10%
• Katlynn: Pizza are selected >80% Fridays
• Brittney: When 2 popular items are on the menu, they have a really close percentage (nachos and chicken rings)
• Juan: Salads are never more than 10%
• Cheyenne: When it is Chicken Patty or Pizza, fewer salads are chosen
• Julian: Chicken Patty and Pizza seem to be the most popular
• Johann: Chicken Patty was 85% 3 weeks in a row

After discussing these observations the students began to work on finding mean, median, mode, and range for each lunch choice. 

Students asked a few questions about the food. They were interested in how the food was ordered, how they decided how much quantity to order, and other things like that. One of the students decided to ask someone in the kitchen to come and talk about this with us. Hopefully they will agree and come talk about it.

The Lunch Project Day 3

Today we worked on finding the percent each lunch choice had been chosen daily. Then we started looking at that data. The students are looking now at the datum to find any interesting or seemingly significant trends or observations. I am not expecting much, I am not sure they have ever been asked to look at data and draw conclusions from it in this manner before.

Just a few of my own observations:

• The Friday that we had Valentine's parties had the largest attendance of any day.
• Chicken patties easily squash any other choice on Wednesdays.
• Chicken rings and nachos seem to be equally popular.
• Pizza is constantly a twelve to one choice over PB&J.
• Wednesdays seem to have better attendance than Fridays. Does this mean kids come for chicken patties that miss for pizza?
• Some of my students are beginning to find this interesting, others not so much. I am fascinated.

The Lunch Project Day Two

Friday the class came together and we looked at the work they were supposed to complete, finding the frequency of the second choice of meals. They found nineteen different choices over the thirty-three day period.

Next we identified the number of choices that had been used as a choice one and a choice two, of which there were four: hamburger/cheeseburger, nachos, tomato soup with grilled cheese, and grilled chicken.

We figured the percentage of time each choice was given throughout the period. Luckily we collected data for 33 straight days (not on purpose, but I will take all the luck I can get) and soon discovered we could multiply the number of times a choice was given times one percent. The largest percentage was with the salad which is the third choice daily.

The question I asked to the class was, "Is it significant that 33% of the choice opportunities is one food item?" They thought that it was, but I explained we wouldn't know for sure until we saw how often students chose a salad. We are going to have a lot of tough discussions about salads as a choice when they discover (as I have seen while glancing through the data) that it is going to be a pretty small percent of students that choose it.

I also spent some time surveying the class and asking out of the four most offered choices, which ones did the students like the most. Chicken Patty was the favorite with twelve of the twenty students picking it as their first choice.

After we did the informal polling we watched a couple videos on how samples are used statistically. Next we will be looking at identifying the percentage each was chosen daily. We should be able to identify the more popular food choices and also start to look at if the position of the food choices are important.

The Lunch Project Day One: Beginning the Project

In my math class we have started a large project. We are analyzing lunch data collected over the past month. Originally my ideas was to find a project the students could do some measures of central tendency with that would be better than textbook questions. At the same time (not exactly the same time, I don't multi-think any better than I multi-task) I was pondering our lunch program and the number of my students that always took the first choice for lunch. They often chose it without even knowing what the choice was.

I went to the lunch secretary and asked her to keep track of the information for what students lunches the students chose daily. Every day for the past month she ran a copy of the number of students by grade level that picked each choice. Today we started breaking it down.

The first thing we are doing is identifying what choices are repeated most often. Every Wednesday is chicken patty day, every Friday is pizza. Yes, it is as boring as it sounds. Tomorrow we will start working on finding out which choice was picked most often.

The students are already thinking about other ways they can address issues with the lunch program. This could end up being a very large project. 

That Time My Network Didn't Become Trolls

I was doing a quick check of my Twitter feed when I saw a comment from @JonBecker  that led me to this post by Will Richardson.  The conversation revolved around the comment by Don Brookover, a student at the University of South Alabama. Go ahead and read the post and the comment.

The conversation around the comment was at first of irritation (anger?), but it eventually evolved to addressing this issue. I found Mr. Brookover's blog and suggested that instead of talking about it on Twitter it might be better if it happened on the post.

This could have gone badly. I see too often people react very poorly to thoughts they disagree with online and their responses are worse than the original post. Let's face it, there is a lot of frustration and anger in the education technology field driven by our perceptions of the direction schools are headed. When confronted with a pre-service teacher that seems to flippantly discount what we are trying to do online, becoming angry is a very real possibility.

Fortunately, the network responded with respect and dignity. They responded to engage and educate, not to shame or hate.

As I thought about this throughout the day I could see a very real parallel between Mr. Brookover and students that I have. They have different experiences, different backgrounds, and they think differently than I do. Shame and hate won't help my students learn either. There are lots of lessons for us in this story. 

I Hide My Disability

This was originally posted on Education Debate

I’m not interested in being politically correct. I don’t think we should treat people differently, I think we should treat each other with respect and dignity. I see no respect or dignity in labels. Having written that I am immediately going to do the exact opposite and label myself. (I doubt I have to worry about offending myself anyway.)

I have a problem that causes me a lot of grief. It makes being a professional educator difficult. It has caused me to lose sleep, become very anxious, even decline to do things that would be beneficial for me and others simply because of the stress it causes. To sum it up, it isn’t any fun at all.

My problem is social anxiety. I haven’t been diagnosed by a doctor, but I know the effects. As a child I was very, very uncomfortable in new situations. The problem was so bad that I ran away from kindergarten every day for the first week of school. Of course there was no diagnosis, no trips to a counselor’s office, just my grandfather picking me up and taking me back. I had to “tough it out”.

If I am in a new situation, especially meeting new people, I can be very quiet. I even developed a coping mechanism, yawning. I don’t know where it came from or why I do it, but if you see me in social situation yawning I am not bored, I am anxious. Obviously this habit does not endear me to others.

I find it very difficult to be in new places. I often find it difficult to go to places I am familiar with by myself. I have been known to pass up gas stations hoping I have enough to get me home because I can’t stop at a station that I have used many times.

My wife, Dianna has been very helpful. She for all intents and purposes becomes my coach exhorting me to go beyond my comfort zone. Without her prodding there is no way I would have presented at METC this year. There is no way I would have attended ISTE in San Antonio a few years ago if she hadn’t gone with me or EdCampKC for that matter. Sometimes she is just understanding enough to let me be and not get upset that I can’t return that item to Wal Mart because I am just too anxious right then.

What accommodations have I made for myself so that I can be successful? I try to always have someone I know with me. I try to arrive at new places early so I can become familiar with them before the added stress of the event that is taking place. I carry something with me like a book or hand held game so that I can retreat into a comfortable situation. I decline to do a lot of things that I later regret. I talk to people online.

I have discovered that the social issues I have in the face to face world go away when I am typing on a keyboard. I can have conversations with people I would never be able to even say “Hello” to in person. I have even found that by having these conversations online I can transfer that confidence to face to face meetings.

How many students have a “hidden” disability? Students can often go for years hiding illiteracy, how much easier is it to hide something even less obvious than that? What are you doing in your classroom for kids like me that some days are barely hanging on until they can get back home where they can relax? Have you actively sought out the quiet kids or the ones that don’t seem to make friends and spend a few minutes with them? If you go out of your way to make them more comfortable, they will be more successful in your classroom.

Modeling Bad Behavior

A couple days ago I was using an aluminum foil boat to collect data for our math class. We were practicing on mean, median, mode etc. (see post below) and I wanted to tie it in to what I had planned to do in science. As I conducted the experiment the students kept asking me about what I was doing. They knew it was to collect data, but they wanted more information. Kids get indignant when you refuse to share information with them!

A thought occurred to me and I decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to have them watch me do an experiment and allow them to critique what I did. This would give me a good idea about what they already know and what we should focus on. Today I conducted the experiment.

I was looking for the students to identify a few specific behaviors that I modeled incorrectly including:

1. I did not have my instructions for the experiment.
2. I did not do any measuring or data collection.
3. I played around by shaking the wet aluminum boat at a nearby student.

Most of them didn't identify any of these three behaviors. They were more focused on safety (I didn't wear gloves!) and the fact that I left my tools out instead of putting them away. I suspect that both of these ideas have been well instilled in them and now I know where to put in my effort.

Was this a better pre-assessment than giving them a multiple choice test?

My Mostly Positive Experience With Donors Choose

This was previously posted on the MSTA blog. 

A few years ago on a lark I asked my wife to buy me a ukulele for Christmas. After almost two years of noodling with it at home and at school (modeling learning to my students) I decided that I wanted to start a ukulele club at school. I talked to my building principal about it and she was very supportive. With money always an issue I told her that I would like to try Donors Choose, a site where teachers can ask for money to be used to fund projects.

I went to the Donors Choose site, DonorsChoose.org, and set up an account. I had to look carefully and read a couple help files to figure out how to set up the project. I wish it had been easier, but I did eventually figure it out. As I was setting up the project I discovered a few things that almost made me stop.

The first problem I had was that there was an 'optional donation' figured into the price. After reading the information I saw that it was to help defray any changes in the amount that was quoted because many projects don't get funded in the usual 30 days the quotes are good for. Any monies not used that way are then used by the organization to help fund other projects. This seems reasonable to me.

The second problem is that I was restricted to specific sites to order from. The ukuleles I wanted were $20 cheaper on Amazon than on the site I was required to use. That being said, choosing the products for the project was as simple as adding them to the cart. That worked seamlessly and I was very impressed.

After finishing up putting all the information required for the project I submitted it to be checked over. Donors Choose uses volunteers to make sure the information meets the site's expectations. It only took a few days until I received the email that it was approved and live.

After getting the email I wrote a blog post for my class blog. There I explained how to use the match code I received from the organization. This code allowed donations made through the first seven days of the project to be doubled up to $100 a piece! This effectively made each donation using the code double. Because of this, I tweeted the link on Twitter to my post that gave the match code. I wanted all the matching funds I could get!

While waiting for the project to be approved I spent some time talking about it on Twitter with my friends. I had several that asked t be notified when it went live so I tweeted to them first. Many of the donations I received came from people that I talk to on Twitter. Don't underestimate the power of social media to help fund your project! If you don't use Twitter, Facebook can also be a great place to ask for help.

I anxiously kept a watch on my project site to see how the donations were going, I was completely shocked that in less than twelve hours it was fully funded. I received notice the next day that the items have been ordered (much faster than going through my school district's bureaucracy :) I was very surprised by the speed of the whole process.

Enrichment Needs to Be Embedded, Not Added On

Being a teacher in a high poverty, rural district I have been expected to read a lot of books about how children in poverty are different when it comes to their ability to learn. Typically the argument is that the life they lead outside of school makes a difference in how they learn and what they learn.

I'm not brain researcher and I have no experience with students that come from upper middle class or wealthy homes either so to speculate on the truthfulness of these arguments would be just that. What I do have is a long term exposure to children that live in poverty because I grew up here from the perspective of a middle class upbringing (although to be truthful my parents worked long and hard to get to middle class even though they both have college degrees.)

I have been reading Teaching with Poverty in Mind by Eric Jensen. I see a lot of familiar information in the book, things I have been exposed to since I was in my education classes. Something that is sticking with me from this book is the idea of student enrichment. The idea being that students in high poverty areas need more enrichment opportunities at school because they get fewer of those opportunities at home.

Did I mention we have a very large percentage of our students that ride buses home? Guess who don't get to participate in enrichment activities outside of school?

This year my school started a before school enrichment program (with a 'let's increase our test scores by doing computer based learning' component). Students have the opportunity three times a week to participate in an activity during time they used to sit in our gym to get ready for the day. I am pretty sure this just isn't enough enrichment to bridge the gap.

I realize that enrichment to my students has to happen in the classroom, but what exactly does that entail? How do I give my students enriching learning activities during the school day? I'm pretty sure that I can't do it successfully if all I do is test prep. Seriously.

When Something Isn't Working, Recognize it and Do Something Different

I have known for about a month that my math class wasn't working. Let me give some background first. This is the first year I have taught math in the last ten. I only have a couple years' experience as it is so I am by no means a master math teacher. Because of my lack of experience I was given the 'high' math group, the idea being that they can learn without me if needed (more on this later.)

I started the year explaining that we were going to spend more time trying to really master the math, not just go through it. To foster that idea, I emphasized that when students didn't show mastery through their assessments they needed to go back, identify the problems, fix the problems and retest. We spent a lot of time after every assessment modeling that behavior. It seemed to work very well as long as the math was easy, it has fallen apart now that it is harder.

A typical lesson runs like this, the first day I would work examples of the new material on the board and then assign practice work for them to do. The answers for these problems are in the back of the book so the students can check their work. The next day I would ask if they had any questions or needed any particular problems shown to them. Usually I ask that question and hear crickets. Then I assign the problems that don't have answers in the back. The third day I answer those questions and do a quick assessment to see if we are ready to move on.

Over time I noticed that several students were not doing the practice work, and doing miserably on the 'ungraded' work. (I try hard to not take grades on any practice.) Not surprisingly, they failed the assessment miserably. I thought they had learned their lesson and they did much better on the make-up assessment a couple days later. I assumed wrong. The cycle is repeating, but their is no drive to learn from the mistakes.

As you can imagine this is a pretty frustrating development. The lack of effort seems to be spreading and I am at the point that I have to change something because this is not working. Do you have any ideas you would like to share?