Exhibition (Part I of …)

Kogut and I really should write about exhibition sometime.  But tonight is the night before it goes live, and I’m mostly sitting here feeling incredibly proud of my students.  Just a smattering of examples of why …

– One of my students, who is working on social skills, giving a strong exhibition to a small group of teachers this afternoon.

– My last period class asking each other questions to help each other hit criteria they may have missed during their practice.

– A student who is working on getting to school on time and thus misses math up to 1/2 of the time, keeping up with the project, becoming more engaged because we were going in depth and she can re-orient more quickly, asking thoughtful, genuine questions during practice today.

– A student seeing a video about her topic and exclaiming, “I am going to add some of what I just learned to my presentation!”

– A student, who does not often volunteer to help others, tutoring his groupmates.

– Students informing each other that they will act professional/on time/not giggle/stand tall during Exhibition, no bones about it.

None of this is surprising, but it bears mentioning, and my students are awesome people. I am glad Exhibition gives them an opportunity to shine.

SL

(P.S. No, it’s not perfect and no, not all the presentations will knock your socks off, but that, perhaps, isn’t the point.)

Feedback!

About three years ago, Kogut and I re-wrote an Algebra 1 project that happens at our school every year. (It’s called exhibition; the end-product includes students presenting their project to approximately 20 students and adults; it’s a long story; we’ll tell you more about it for sure sometime.) Basic background: our Algebra 1 exhibition involves students using linear regressions to analyze real data about worldwide or school issues. My senior math class (Advanced Mathematical Decision Making) exhibition involves a statistical analysis of data about a social issue (linked to the Civics class) and its prevalence in our school.

For several years, I’ve enjoyed the process of giving feedback on these projects. As a rule, I don’t grade the “first draft” of the math work, but rather solely give feedback in relation to the objectives. This feedback-giving barely feels like grading; rather, I get to look at students’ thinking without immediately evaluating it. I get to enjoy the hard work students have done and then offer suggestions for improvement and point out where students’ have skimped on certain parts. Students then have the opportunity to revise before I finally do evaluate their mastery of the objectives.

What I’ve noticed is that students do not miss the grade at all, but rather appreciate that I actually paid close attention to their work. This year, when I gave the seniors back their first drafts, only one person in the entire class asked about a grade. Everyone else (and that student too, once I explained) just started revising their work. The results were almost entirely high quality, and the process felt real, respectful, and meaningful. I look forward to shifting my classroom so that most of the work involves this process of genuine feedback and revision, and to including students as important feedback-givers.

SL

What Math?

So, I’m imagining (wishfully thinking?) that maybe someone now is reading this and wondering … what exactly are they talking about!?  So here’s an example of what kind of math I’m talking about teaching.

We will very likely start off the year with the Color Map Problem.  This is a famous math problem that asks, if no neighboring regions can have the same color, what is the smallest number of different colors required to color any map?

This problem is good in general and particularly at the beginning of the year for a few reasons.

1) It’s low threshold, high ceiling.  That means that students with diverse math experiences can comfortably enter the problem, and that the problem involves high level thinking and can go incredibly abstract/in depth.  These are the best kind of problems.

2) It’s not a familiar problem.  The Color Map is a discrete math problem.  Few students have encountered much discrete math before college, so the problem levels the playing field and doesn’t favor the students who have previously excelled at math.

3) You can go far with it!  After students color one map and figure out how to articulate their strategy, they can see if their strategy would work for another map, they could try a different strategy altogether, or they could work on how to represent their map in other ways (hey there, graph theory!).

Hopefully this begins to answer the question of what exactly we’re talking about.  And if you haven’t done the Color Map problem, find yourself a blank map of Boston neighborhoods or South America (or anywhere!) and see how few colors you can use.

SL