Initial Inspiration

I’ve been told many times that I should blog, but have always felt that I’m not doing enough things the “right way” in my classroom to put myself “out there”.  This time, I’ve taken on a big enough task that I’m going to need support to pull it off.

On Wednesday, I was part of the first Digital Learner event for the year, where we listened to a variety of speakers who left us with a lot to think about.  The keynote speaker,  Will Richardson (@willrich45) said something that I’ve heard before, but hadn't fully processed, which is "if we were teaching the same way that we’ve been taught, how have we progressed in the last 20 years?"  He also brought up the point that we really aren’t needed to teach children specific skills – they can learn about fractions or decimals online very easily.  Our job is to make, shape and develop self-sustaining learners – people that can figure out what they need to know and go out and learn it.

This got me thinking about my math program.  I am excited to teach math, but I fall back on the same model of showing something concretely, pictorially, numerically, and then giving students questions to do until they have achieved some form of mastery.  In the younger grades, it seems to work fine, but I invariably end up giving the quick finishers more difficult concepts to keep them interested (and occupied).  In a grade 5/6 classroom, the range of abilities that I have at my doorstep is just as wide, but my quick finishers are getting even further ahead.

So the idea that sprung into my head is to let everyone in the class work at their own pace.  This doesn't seem like a totally novel concept, but is a great challenge than it sounds.  This led me to create a checklist of the math calculating skills from grades 5 and 6.  I used this as an inventory for the students to assess what math skills they are confident in.

The second thing I did was have them create a small journal entry in their math books, completing the sentence, “Today I am going to learn about…”

I gave them some goals for how they could demonstrate mastery of a concept:

1. Show me an easy question, a medium question, and a difficult question
2. Solve the questions
3. Explain the steps that it takes to solve them
4. Explain how they would use that math “in real life”. 

When we finished our hour and a half of math (which passed by in a flash), I had them write another small journal entry summarizing, “Today I learned / made progress on / got stuck on…”  

During the math class, I saw a level of student engagement that surprised me.  In fact, it surpassed expectation.  Most of the students loved the idea.  My favourite comment was a question from a student who asked, “Mr. Becker, what happens if I make a mistake?”  He was surprised and relieved to find out that mistakes didn’t matter, that they were actually a good thing to make, and it only mattered if you learned what you were working on.

The self-inventory worked quite well!  Of course a couple students still checked things off that they didn’t really know.  In one case it was a complete lack of understanding of the math concepts, and the other was a student who knew that he should know multiplying, but actually didn’t.  The journal entries worked well to focus the students on their tasks, and the debrief of the entries were valuable to me to gauge their progress.

This exercise showed me that there is a lot of potential in this method of teaching.  It also showed me that I have a LOT of work ahead of me.  I need to create “drill sheets” – short timed drill exercises that are designed to take students from the point of understanding towards automation of the skills.  I also need to come up with interesting challenge questions for students to apply their newfound understanding against, in order to gauge if they understand or are mechanically recalling a process they have learned.  I'm looking forward to the journey ahead!