Tuesday, July 28, 2015

My Foldable Notebook for Teachers

Shortly after I started using Foldables in 2012, I realized that their use was transforming my planning process for the better.  Prior to using Foldables, I was teaching from a textbook.  If the textbook had three examples in a section, I was going to present them.  If the textbook ordered the sections in a particular way, that's the order I was going to teach them to my students.  I hate to entirely slam textbooks.  After all, there are lots of people working to produce textbooks from curriculum writers to teachers who pilot them in their classrooms, and I have to believe that all those people working together will produce some quality work.  However, after being mostly textbook-free for about 3 years, I can say that I don't always feel like my students saw the big picture when we were using textbooks.

Enter Foldables.  When I used the first few, I thought they were cutesy and not much else.  I didn't see why I should "waste time" cutting and folding when we had so much material to cover.  It felt like it took an eternity to get students through the assembly to the point of having something they could use.  However, I also noticed that students remembered the notes (or the fact they HAD notes) on the topics we did with Foldables.  They made an appearance on desks after the initial note-taking was over.

As I reflected on the use of Foldables more, I recognized that I was approaching content differently.  I would ask myself, "What is the main idea?" followed by, "What are the supporting ideas?"  My answers to these questions helped me select the structure of the Foldable that was most appropriate for the topic.  How the shape of the Foldable, the direction of the folds, and the number of sections would reinforce the content I was teaching was at the forefront of my mind.  This meant I was truly reflecting on the connections students needed to make in planning my lessons.  I also was deliberately chunking my lesson, something that's vital since a teen will remember only about 5 chunks of information at one time.  I absolutely had these thoughts pre-Foldables, but less frequently than with them.  I've become a better teacher through the use of Foldables.

For the last year or so, I've wanted to make a resource that would help in my planning.  I've used countless Foldable designs and I have digital templates that I've made for nearly all of them because I typically have Cloze notes on them for my students to fill in as we go. Nevertheless, I feel like I rely on certain designs too often (2-door or 4-door shutter fold is my go-to!) and when the novelty wears off, so too does the learning!  So this afternoon, I started to put together a sample composition book full of Foldable designs and some other interactive notebook resources.  The book is organized by the number of sections needed since that's my focus when I plan Foldables.  I used some tabs to mark off each section of the notebook and I left several pages at the end of each section that will allow me to add new ideas when they come to me.

Sam Shah (@samjshah) blogged about teachers having a "brand" at #TMC15 this year.  While I wasn't able to be in attendance, I agree with his observation that we (the MTBoS) are less likely to label celebrities than we were in previous years.  More of us are out there and that's helping us to develop circles of interest.  Most circles have a teacher or two leading the charge, hence their "brand."  Can we all have a brand?  Sure.  Will all of us have a brand that other teachers in other schools can identify?  Not unless we blog or tweet A LOT and have high readership.  I would pose the question this way: can your students and your close colleagues (whether in person or virtually) identify your brand?  I'm pretty sure if you asked my students, interactive notebooks with Foldables are my brand.  Sarah (@mathequalslove), Kathryn (@kathrynfreed), Julie (@jreulbach), and numerous other bloggers have way more posted about notebooks than I do, so I'm not the MTBoS guru, however notebooks are one thing that sets me apart from the other teachers in my school. 

That uniqueness in my school led me to a secondary purpose for this Foldable notebook.  I'm starting as a math teacher specialist this fall at a high school.  While I've used interactive notebooks for the last two years with my 8th grade students and classify them largely as a success, I don't think any of the teachers I'm going to be working with have used them.  My supervisor is a fan and said she would like to see the teachers use them at the high school level.  I thought that in addition to my completed notebooks from the past two years, having this resource on hand might make it easier for a teacher to use Foldables for the first time. 

Sorry this is a wonky slideshow.  I had designs on a true video but I'm short on storage on my phone, so this is the best I could do.  If you're tying to find templates of what's shown, click on the label "interactive notebook" or "foldable" under this blog post to be taken to all posts concerning those topics.  Many of the things in this notebook are just small pieces of paper cut and folded, so I don't have them as typed templates at that small size.      


One final note: I tried the Pinterest acclaimed glue sponge and I am impressed.  While I doubt it would be really mess-free for little kids, it made quick work of my gluing today, I had no blobs of glue to contend with, and everything stuck nicely to my book.  Consider me a fan! 

What have you done to get pedagogically reinvigorated for the upcoming year?

Mathematically yours,
Miss B

Friday, June 26, 2015

The most bittersweet of announcements

Well, friends, I did something today I couldn't have imagined myself doing just a month ago.  I interviewed for a new job.  This school year things were rough and many of my teammates left for a variety of reasons.  I seized on the opportunity to apply for a math teacher specialist position in my county knowing that it would be easier on me emotionally to change schools when so many of my friends were doing the same thing. There were positions at both high schools in the county and the middle school I don't currently work at.

My interview was scheduled at 11:30.  I was a bundle of nerves waiting around all morning for 11:30.  I live about 0.2 mile from the board of ed, so I didn't even really have to factor in drive time!  I arrived about 15 minutes early (just in case?) and was taken back to do my writing prompt right away.  Martha explained, "They just want to see that you can communicate."  My thought: They hired me 7 years ago so I certainly hope I can communicate!  With that completed, I went back to the waiting room for a few minutes.  The receptionist, bless her, was making small talk with her the whole time.  Totally took my mind off the waiting factor.  :)

The math supervisor came out to get me for the interview.  I had 6 interviewers- the supervisor, 3 principals, an incoming AP and an outgoing AP.   They had just 5 questions for me pertaining to how I plan a lesson, how I would plan PD, and how I would use assessment data.  I did that thing where I talked entirely too fast and left out 3/4 of what I had rehearsed in my brain.  Ugh. 

They asked me for questions and I tried to nail down what expectations each building principal had for me.  Essentially, they all want an instructional coach who is in classrooms daily, observing lessons, modeling good teaching, and working with teachers to improve their practices.  Yes!  That's exactly what I want to do. The most interesting follow up question was about how I would build rapport with the teachers. (This will be a key hurdle; many of the teachers I'll be working with are well past 20 years of teaching.  Their own children are around my age.)

My supervisor walked me out of the interview room.  "You did a good job," she said.  "I'll be calling you at the beginning of next week.  Congratulations."  My immediate thought was that she probably should not be congratulating me yet!  The interview panel still had to decide.  

I left the interview at 12:15.  I came home, called my parents briefly to give them the run down, and headed out to the grocery store for a few items.  At 1:40 while I was unpacking the groceries, the phone started ringing.  The head of HR was on the phone to offer me the job at the high school that my school feeds into.  It was such a whirlwind; I had only left the interview room about 90 minutes earlier!  I accepted. 

I've learned so much and made wonderful friendships with my colleagues at LMS.  I'm honestly sad to leave them.  However, given all of the changes that have happened at LMS over the past year, I felt like I was in a place where I could make the transition to a new position.  I am excited for the new opportunity but sad to leave behind good friends and the stability of actually teaching the same courses again for the 3rd year in a row!  I cannot wait to implement positive changes to help my former students while they are high school students. 

So, MTBoS, I need your help.  Could you please answer these questions?
1. If you are a teacher, what support would you welcome from an instructional coach?
2. How would you suggest a teacher specialist make inroads with teachers who are not eager to try new instructional practices or to share what they are doing?

Mathematically yours,
Miss B


Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Summer is here!

Coming off my most draining school year of my career, I'm so happy to say that it's finally summer!  This school year was difficult more so for the personal challenges than for professional ones, however the line between personal and professional was quite blurry this year.  I also took on a new challenge or two that contributed to the chaos. Here's a recap of my year since my blog has been quiet this year. 

When the school year started, I agreed to be my grade level's team leader.  There are 14 teachers in 8th grade, plus our ELL teacher, guidance counselor, and AP attended the meetings.  I enjoyed the task of organizing our agenda and (usually) running an efficient meeting that stayed on topic.  We met almost every Monday for about 30 minutes.  In all, I think I did a good job, but I'd like to see us nominate a secretary next year and keep electronic minutes that we can share with anyone who is absent or with admin as needed.  I wanted to do so this year, but it didn't happen at the beginning of the year, so it didn't happen period. 

I switched classrooms.  This was 90% a good thing.  I love having windows and an exterior door.  My mood improves just by seeing daylight, unlike in my old room that was windowless.  I also liked being back from the hallway; I got to be blissfully unaware of some of the drama of 8th grade because my hall duty was minimal.  The things I missed about my old room were my magnetic whiteboard, getting to know all of the students on hall duty, and my awesome next-door-neighbor.  The two of us just "get" each other and it was easy to give a knowing look between classes, bounce lesson ideas off of each other on the fly, or swap difficult students into the other room for a few minutes when a time-out was needed.   Not that my new neighbor wasn't great; he was.  I just have a great bond with the other teacher and I miss being right there next to her. 

I found a house in August, just as school was starting.  I closed at the end of September, had significant work done, and moved in just prior to Thanksgiving.  Between packing, paperwork, unpacking, and coping with the challenges posed by a 60+ year old house, I probably doubled my workload this year. 

Back in December, I had a medical issue that resulted in surgery in January.  As I was going in for the surgery, we got a call that my grandmother was not doing well.  I was able to make it back to see her before she passed two days later.  For someone who usually has perfect or near-perfect attendance at school, this year marked more absences than the previous 6 years combined. 

As spring came, we got some bad news about a couple of colleagues at school.  One 8th grade teacher's husband passed away following a surgery.  They were looking forward to her retirement this June so they could spend more time together (he was already retired).  Connie, a history teacher on my team, passed away rather suddenly from a relapse of her cancer.  She'd battled it twice before, once in 2009 and once in 2012.  This time, it was too much.  Her passing left a huge whole in the team. 

So, it's been a tumultuous year.  I've been in a funk since December/January when I got sick and Mommom passed, and I don't think I ever really emerged back to my happy self.  I'm looking to summer to reenergize me and help me reframe things in a positive light. 

To that end, a little something happy.  :)  You deserve it, too, if you've read this far!

I'm taking a grad class right now on Differentiated Instruction.  Let me start by saying it's a required class for my Master's and it wouldn't have been my first choice.  It's been very good, though.  We met last weekend and will meet again this weekend to finish the class.  I'm really getting a more positive view of differentiation than I had before.  It's still going to be a lot of work to do some of the things proposed, liked tiered assignments, but I'm also already doing much more differentiation than I ever realized.  

One of the activities proposed was called "cubing."  From the name, I had no idea what this could be.  Turns out, it's just using dice.  Haha!  It was suggested that we personalize dice with questions and have students roll to decide which questions they would answer.  You can allow them to pass once if you like.  Anyway, I had remembered seeing "Cool Cubes" in Teacher's Discovery catalog.  I wanted them last year when I saw them, but I didn't think they were worth $16.95 for 4.  I hit up Dollar Tree and my laminator and made my own.  My grad class friends are each going to get one, my little gift for making this class enjoyable (and so much more than my last grad class).

Here's what you'll need to do:
1. Pick up some foam dice from Dollar Tree.  These might be hard to find, so try a couple stores if you need to.  I thought they were discontinued because they've been dwindling in my local stores over the past year.  I had to dig under dinosaur hats to find these.  Good news: if you want a bunch, they're available online.  You could probably ask your store to stock them if you want less than 36 packs. 
Not fuzzy.

2. Laminate a piece of cardstock.  This will be your erasable surface, so white or a light color makes the most sense. 
Nerdy Teacher.  Best $17.99 on Amazon ever.
3. Punch/cut out the laminated paper sized to fit the dice.  I used a 1.75" circle punch from my scrapbooking tools.  If you don't have one, consider if your school has a suitable die on an Ellison machine (like the middle of the letter O) or if you have a crafty friend/parent volunteer who could help.  Free handing is also an option but I'm too much of a perfectionist for that. 
Scrapbooking supplies are always good for math
4. Adhere the laminated paper to the dice.  I used some photo squares that I had.  Double sided tape would be great.  Just look for something permanent instead of removable or you'll be replacing the tape often.  Then, break out your wet-erase markers.  I knew there was a reason I kept them long after the days of overhead projectors in my classroom. 
Under $3 investment!

I'm going to use these in my French class with some of our most common questions.
In math, can see myself using questions about functions, giving the students in a group each a different sheet of 4-6 graphs, equations, tables, etc to consider.  My questions would be, "Identify functions with slope > 2," or "Compare your 1st function with your neighbor's 1st function,"  or "Which has the smallest initial value?"

Other ideas:
If you're trying to be more efficient, you can type up your list of questions, number them 1-6, hand out the list to students, and use regular dice.  Less fun, but just as effective. 
Put vocabulary on the dice, have students take turns defining or drawing each term.

How have you used so-called "cubing" in your classroom?

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Absolute Value Functions Part 2

After a few days of working on absolute value functions, I wanted my students to apply it to something concrete.  They had the transformations and graphing down pretty well and had done creative assignments to demonstrate their understanding.  I found a "Fire House" problem that seemed like a good fit.  http://www.txar.org/training/materials/Algebra_II/10MAPAbsoluteValueStudentLesson03142007.pdf

My mistake: I used the problem after my students knew too much about writing absolute value functions, so going back to linear functions seemed odd to my students.

I did like the problem; they got right into modeling.  The biggest discussion was how you count blocks.  Culturally, I could have guessed that this would be hard for my kids to get.  I live in a rural area and most students don't live in an area where they can walk "a block" to get somewhere.  I saw the lightbulbs go off as I explained how houses are numbered by blocks.  The 100s, 200s, and 300s are separated by cross streets.  Many didn't know this or had never realized it. 

We got through parts I and II today.  Tomorrow we'll tackle the graphing calculator-heavy extension. 

If I use this problem set again, I will reword a few questions to make it more clear what is being asked.  I had a few questions come up over and over as I moved from group to group. 

What's your favorite way to teach absolute value functions?

Mathematically yours,
Miss B

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Absolute Value Functions

I taught a lesson I really liked today because my kids were into it, even after a very long session of PARCC testing.  It's bringing me back to blogging after a very quiet school year.  :)

Earlier this year, my Algebra I students learned about exponential functions.  We've been asked to follow the sequencing of EngageNY and I'm not a huge fan of the program.  For whatever reason, that meant that my treatment of absolute value functions came after exponentials.  This makes little sense to me, but it meant that absolute value functions seemed very obvious to my classes, which I expected.

I made a set of 12 graphs using Desmos.com, took screenshots, and printed them as cards for each student.  The students cut the cards apart and we got to work sorting the cards after a short reminder of what absolute value means and a sketch of the parent function using a table of values.  For each round of the sort, I had students keep the parent function separate from the other graphs so they would have it as a point of reference from which to make comparisons.

The sorting rounds each worked like this:
  • I told students what characteristic they should sort by (orientation, stretch/shrink, horizontal shift, vertical shift).
  • Students sorted the cards by themselves.
  • At their tables, students discussed the answers to three questions:
  1. How many piles did you make?
  2. What did you label the piles? 
  3. Which cards belonged in each pile and why?
  • Following a brief team discussion, we had a whole class discussion of the sorting methods and the cards that they selected to put in each pile.  
In the sorting, we were able to develop the vocabulary word "vertex" as well as further clarify the difference between a vertical stretch and a vertical shrink.  Speaking of stretch or shrink, the BEST tip I have on teaching that (and what I would share as a "my favorite" if I were going to TMC15) is that I have taught my students to take out "imaginary silly putty" and stretch it out.  I've taught them that in math class we only stretch silly putty vertically.  If I say "get out your silly putty" they all mime stretching silly putty vertically.  It's cleared up SO much confusion compared to previous years and none of them are really confused by it like I can remember in the past. 

After sorting, students glued the cards into their ISNs, and wrote notes under each graph describing any differences from the parent function.  We did the first few together and they did the rest in their groups.  Then, as groups finished, I distributed lists of equations that matched each graph.  Students matched the graphs and equations using their prior knowledge of transformations on exponential functions.  This part took so little time and students were overall confident in their answers.

With the hard work done, we just needed to formalize our notes with a summary page. 

The document I'm sharing contains the graphs, equations, and sorting questions.



This document was our pre- and post- notes.




Mathematically yours,
Miss B


Monday, November 24, 2014

Students' racial identities

Let's start this by laying out some groundwork.  I'm white, grew up in a predominately white community (at least 80%), attended a predominately white college, currently live in a predominately white community, and teach in a predominately white school.  That is to say that there have been few times in my life when I've been in a situation in which my race made me a minority.  Having friends who aren't white may give me some insights into what being a minority can be like, but it doesn't truly inform me.

My French class has been writing introductory letters to penpals in France. They know very few themes of vocabulary so far, and I've been encouraging them to use what they know instead of question me for endless lists of words.  In any case, I've entertained some requests and I was surprised to find out how many students wanted to specify their race or ethnic heritage in their letters.  None of the initial letters we received provided this information.  My French class is the most diverse class I teach and probably one of the most diverse in the entire school given our demographics.  Of the 23 students, 8 are white, 8 are African American, 1 is Native American, 5 are Hispanic or Latino, and 1 is "mixed" (her word, not mine- the school says "two or more races").  For comparison sake, my Algebra classes are 17 or 18 students of which at most 3 are not white. 

I remarked at this trend in vocabulary queries today because I realized no white students had asked me how to say, "I'm white" but I'd answered that question for every other race or ethnicity at some point over the past few days.  I'm not sure I've ever had to point out my race, except to fill out demographic info on surveys and the like, so it was interesting to me how many students felt compelled to include it. 

One of the African American students said he wondered if his pen pal was black.  I told him I knew the area where our pen pals live wasn't very diverse (I'd lived nearby a few years ago) and I doubted it; the odds aren't in his favor.  He seemed disappointed. 

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this observation, but I felt like it was worth recording.  If I have some new insights, I'll add to this post later.  I'm not explaining this eloquently, nor do I have a lot of depth to offer on the subject.

What role does race play in your classroom?

Mathematically (and linguistically) yours,
Miss B    

   

Sunday, November 16, 2014

It's official...

... the year of hard work paid off and I'm a National Board Certified Teacher in Early Adolescence Mathematics!  Looking back to January to May of this year, I can honestly say that there was not a single week in which I didn't spend several hours working on my portfolio entries.  Some weeks, I put in 20+ hours.  It was grueling.  Many co-workers who had gone through the process said it was the best PD they'd ever had.  I still think Twitter Math Camp beat out the NBCT process for me as my favorite PD ever, but TMC did have the structure of summer camp going for it. 

Both the NBCT process and the #MTBoS have a common thread of teachers who are continually striving to be better.  I attribute my success in the process, at least in part, to my blogging over the past 2+ years as well as my more recent Twitter exchanges with colleagues around the world.  I've been becoming more comfortable at putting myself out there where I could receive criticism from colleagues (though it comes more rarely than it's due) and I think that made it that much easier for me to critique my practice in an honest way.    

It was interesting to read the feedback with my scores; much of the feedback pointed out the same weaknesses I'd identified prior to submission but I had no way of correcting at the time.  One I've since corrected; I know I do too little to involve parents and this year I've started sending post cards to each student with a positive message.  I'm a bit behind, but the initiative is at least underway!  My biggest regret for NBCT was that I waited so long to film lessons that I was stuck with a particular video that wasn't great quality.  The lesson was good, I know the students' conversations were richer than the audio picked up, but the video just didn't showcase those aspects in the best possible way.  As a result, I had less material to write about than I should have.  My advice, therefore, to anyone currently working on NBCT is to video right away.  Tomorrow, even.  Whether or not you use the video, it's good to get in the habit of having the camera rolling so your students act naturally and you'll have perhaps a few extra videos to choose from when it comes time to write your heart out. 

Submission Night (Only at around 8pm or so, not that I look exhausted or anything!)


Submission Night cookie made by the wonderful Amy of Clough'D 9 Cookies.
Mathematically yours,
Miss B