Trying to find math inside everything else

Posts tagged ‘Common Core’

The Great Geometry Review

Since Kate asked us to post more unsexy things, I thought I would throw up this review book I made for geometry, which basically covers all the things students should “know” (not necessarily be able to do, or deeper understandings) for the course, especially for the NY Regents (Common Core). The students can fill in the blanks and are then left with a nice study guide. So far my students seem to like it! (Although one student said they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t get a grade for it – so frustrating!

Great Geometry Book (doc)

Great Geometry Book (pdf)

Category:

geometry, math

Tagged with:

Rubrics for Standards

So my grading experiment has been going on for a month now, and so far I think it’s going well. But I was pretty stressed about getting it up and running, because a lot of the work was front-loaded. The thing I was particularly working to get done was my mega-rubric. I wanted to make a rubric that showed what exactly students needed to prove they understand to move up a level in a particular learning goal.

So here’s what I made (I call it the SPELS Book to go along with the students’ SPELS sheet):

I started by making the proficient categories, and for the first 8 (The Habits of Mind/Standards of Practice) it was pretty easy to scale them down to Novice, and then to add an additional high-level habit to become masters.

I was stuck, though, on the more Skill-Based Standards. I had all the things I wanted the students to show in each category, but how do I denote if they “sometimes” show me they can graph a linear equation? If I was doing quizzes all the time, like in the past, I could say something like “70% correct shows Apprentice levels.” But I wasn’t, and it seemed like a nightmare to keep track of across varying assignments.

So instead, my co-teacher had the idea that, if each topic had 4 sub-skills that I wanted them to know, we could rank them from easiest to hardest and just have that be the levels. So my system inadvertently became a binary SBG system, but still with the SBG and Level Up shell. Now if a student shows they understand a sub-skill, they level up. If they don’t, I write a comment on their assignment giving advice on what they should do in the future. What remains to be seen is how much they take me up on that advice. We’ll see.

Also, I’d LOVE any feedback you have on the rubric, and how I can improve it. Thanks!

Downloads

SPELS Book (pdf)

Updated Student Character Sheet (pdf)

Updated Student Character Sheet (pages)

Category:

assessment

Tagged with:

Habits of Mind, Standards of Practice

For the past three years, I’ve loosely organized my classroom around the Mathematical Habits of Mind which I first read about in grad school at Bard. I would give the students a survey to determine which habits are their strengths and which are their weaknesses, group them so each group have many strengths, and go from there. Last year I even used the habits as the names of some of my learning goals in my grading.

As I was planning for this year and the transition to the Common Core, I was thinking about how to assess and promote the Standards of Practice. And I realized that they are very similar to what I was already doing with the Habits of Mind. In fact, having a habit of mind would often lead to performing a certain practice! In that way, the SoP are actually the benchmarks by which I can determine if the habits of mind are being used.

Let me demonstrate:

Students should be pattern sniffers. This one is fairly straight-forward. SoP7 demands that students look for and make use of structure. What else is structure but patterns? Those patterns are the very fabric of what we explore when we do math, and discovering them is what leads to even greater conclusions.

Students should be experimenters. The article mentions that students should try large or small numbers, vary parameters, record results, etc. But now think about SoP1 – Make Sense of Problems and Persevere in Solving Them. How else do you do that except by experimenting? Especially if we are talking about a real problem and not just an exercise, mathematicians make things concrete and try out things to they can find patterns and make conjectures. It’s only after they have done that that they can move forward with solving a problem. And if they are stuck…they try something else! Experimenting is the best way to persevere.

Students should be describers. There are many ways mathematicians describe what they do, but one of the most is to Attend to Precision (as evidenced in things like the Peanut Butter & Jelly activity, depending on how you do it.) Students should practice saying what they mean in a way that is understandable to everyone listening. Precision is important for a good describer so that everyone listening or reading thinks the same thing. How else to properly share your mathematical thinking?

Students should be tinkerers. Okay, this one is my weakest connection, mostly because I did the other 7 first and these two were left. But maybe that’s mostly because I don’t think SoP5 is all that great. Being a tinkerer, however, is at the heart of mathematics itself. It is the question “What happens when I do this?” Using Tools Strategically is related in that it helps us lever that situation, helping us find out the answer so that we can move on to experimenting and conjecturing.

Students should be inventors. When we tinker and experiment, we discover interesting facts. But those facts remain nothing but interesting until the inventor comes up with a way to use them. Once a student notices a pattern about, saying, what happens whenever they multiply out two terms with the same base but different exponents, they can create a better, faster way of doing it. This is exactly what SoP8 asks.

Students should be visualizers. The article takes care to distinguish between visualizing things that are inherently visual (such as picturing your house) to visualizing a process by creating a visual analog that to process ideas and to clarify their meaning. This process is central to Modeling with Mathematics (SoP4). It is very difficult to model a process algebraically if you cannot see what is going on as variables change. To model, one must first visualize.

Students should be conjecturers. Students need to make conjectures not just from data but from a deeper understanding of the processes involved. SoP3 asks students to construct viable arguments (conjectures) and critique the reasoning of others. Notable, the habit of mind asks that students be able to critique their own reasoning, in order to push it further.

Students should be guessers. Of course, when we talk about guessing as math teachers, we really mean estimating. The difference between the two is a level of reasonableness. We always want to ask “What is too high? What is too low? Take a guess between.” Those guesses give use a great starting point for a problem. But how do you know what is too high? By Reasoning Abstractly and Quantitatively, SoP2. Building that number sense of a reasonable range strengthens our mathematical ability. We need to consider what units are involved and know what the numbers actually mean to do this.

What we do, or practice, as mathematicians is important, but what’s more important is how we go about things, and why. A common problem found in the math class is students not knowing where to begin. But if a student can develop these habits of mind, through practice, that should never be a problem.

Category:

assessment, schooling, theory

Tagged with: