Keeping Anecdotal Records for Students

Ok, I know it’s something I should do, but I don’t.  Not regularly, not as a habit, and to be honest, not in a way that I can really work with well afterwards.

Why not?  My main excuse would be time.  When one class finishes and I have another to teach coming straight into the room, when do I have a moment to make a note.  And where would I store it, and …..  It’d be easier if I only ever taught one class, but with 5 on the go it’s not something I’ve developed as a habit.

But I’m doing this MYP course and seeing that I really should be doing this.  So how?  Well, I think technology is the answer to my problem, but we have to think about this carefully.

I need something I can use to make very, very, very quick comments without it taking much thought on how I’m going to do this.   So, this is what I’m setting up.

Using ActiveWords, I can set up keyboard shortcuts I can use from anywhere in windows.  So I’ve created a text file for each of my students.  Then I’ve created a VBScript which records my input and appends it to the relevant text file.  Then I created an ActiveWord for each of my students, which runs the VBScript.

So, now, all I have to do, for example, is type David and hit the confirmation key (which is F8 at present but I think I may change to Space Space), wait half a second for the VB InputBox to pop up, type my comment (did amazingly well at solving today’s maths problems), hit enter, and my comment is appended to David.txt (with the date in front of it).

Cool.  And since I can do this in any window, I don’t have to worry about running the application or anything, I can just pop to my machine and in a second or two make a comment.  When I need the comments, I just read the textfile.

Ok, that’s what I’ve come up with so far.  There are a few things I’m not happy with, I’m going to list them in the hope that someone will help me find a solution.

1. ActiveWords appears to be able to work with a line of input, using <LAST LINE>, so theoretically I could work without the VB InputBox which slows things down, but I can’t work out how to pass the contents of <LAST LINE> to the clipboard, or alternatively how to pass it to the VBScript as an argument.
2. I’m having to write a VBScript for each and every single one of my students.  Fortunately I only have about 80, so it’s a hassle but is doable.  I’ve written an ActiveWord that creates a textfile with the appropriate name, but I have to run it for each student.  I’ve written another ActiveWord that uses the textfile name to create the appropriate VBScript.  So it’s a relatively smooth process, but timeconsuming.  I think I can set it up so I only have one ActiveWord that sets up everything for each student, so I’ll only have to run it 80 times (Woo!) but that’s the best I’ve come up with so far.

As it stands at present, there’s some time consuming setup but it works beautifully when it’s all done.  We’ll see how I get on with it after we get back to school.  I’m not sure, but I think ActiveWords works on some handhelds – if that’s so there’s real potential for this to be used in that way, together with a synchronization script.

I also think this could be an outstanding tool for teachers in general, but you have to be pretty tech-savvy to set it up.  It involves buying the ActiveWords software but honestly, I think it’s worth the $50.  I use it for so many other things too.  If there was some way to streamline the whole set up process, perhaps a GUI involving a few options (where do you want to save your files?  Where are your students names?) it would be incredibly powerful and I think very popular.  Maybe ActiveWords and VB aren’t the right way to achieve this, I’ve been reading a little about AutoHotkey and AutoIt and maybe they are more suitable, but I’m not going to put in the time (not at present anyway) to learning whether that is the case.

Catchup reflections for MYP course

Ok, been a bit of a hiatus while we finished school – too much to do and too tired.  But I’ve had a few days off so ready to catchup now.

Ok, 4th Module – Recording and reporting Assessment Data.

Ok, this is an area that’s a bit of an issue – I find this challenging, or at least the first part, recording.  I’m willing to admit I’m probably a bit limited in the strategies I use here.

I use tests for evaluation of criterion A, that’s generally the main tool, occasionally a quiz but that’s really just a variation of a test.  And I use written assignments which generally take up to 2 weeks to develop for evaluation of criteria B, C, and D.  I have used, and intend to be using again asap, blogs for developing criteria C & D, but I’ve not really done any proper evaluation on them before, though I’ve been seeing how I can do that now (We use moodle at school, it’s going to make the evaluation process a lot easier).

Obviously as a teacher I do lots of informal observation just wandering around the classroom, and I know who’s doing well and who is not, but I don’t keep records of it.  I occasionally make some notes, but not in an organised fashion.  My excuse is that it is time-consuming, and with one class after another when do I have a moment to make notes.  I tried doing this with a checklist rubric years ago, but I found I didn’t like wandering around the classroom with a clipboard.  But maybe this is something I need to look into.  It would be fun to use some sort of handheld for this, but I think I need to play with the idea a bit and see what I can come up with before wasting more money on a fancy toy I might end up not using.

Recording assessment data isn’t an issue – I’ve used Asylum’s Markbook program before which I love but I haven’t found it lends itself amazingly to best-fit MYP rubric based marking, though I’d love to be convinced otherwise.  So I use Excel now, which does just fine, and we have SERCO’s ePortal system at school into which we put that data which will appear on reports.

As for reporting, we do this two or three times a year per grade level, we hold parent conferences a couple of times a year.  Ideally these come just after a report has gone out.  ePortal also permits students to see their grades at any time, I believe, though how much that is being used at present I’m not sure.

So that’s what we’re up to at present at our school.  Be interesting to see what comes out of this module.

Content & Context in teaching mathematics

The MYP requires that we teach combining content and context together, and our Unit Plans should be designed accordingly.  Thing is, I’m not convinced this is appropriate with mathematics.

Mathematics is, by its very nature, an abstract subject.  To think mathematically, one needs to be able to separate content from context and explore the logic and internal rules of a situation.  One of the real powers of mathematics is that it can be used to model situations, and that many different situations can be modelled in exactly the same way.  So if we link content strongly to context, we can lose sight of that power.  We root our work so strongly in one situation, one story as it were, and for some students, uprooting it and applying it elsewhere is hard!

Mathematical problems are solved when the internal logical structure has been satisfied, moving from the original situation to the final conclusion.  They don’t need any real world to fit into.  In fact much of mathematical development has nothing whatsoever to do with the real world.

Most mathematics that is around has not been found through people trying to solve real-world problems.  Far from it, in fact.  The great thing about mathematics is that you can decide what you want the initial conditions to be, and then you run with them and see what you end up with.  The conclusions are fascinating in their own right, it’s like saying ‘look, this is what I started with, and look what I can do with it!  Isn’t this cool!’  It’s like when your child runs up to you all excited about what they’ve built from a complicated mess involving a sheet, two pencils, a cardboard box, half a bucket of Lego and a Spiderman sticker.  It’s just cool ‘cos it’s cool.  No other reason required.

And later on, perhaps, people come up with useful things to do with the whacky stuff people think up.  But if everyone only focused on the real-world, we probably wouldn’t have the useful whacky stuff.

Many of our students have enough difficulty realising that the way they solved problem (a) can also be used to solve problem (b).  One of the best ways to become good at mathematics is to solve more problems.  The more we solve, the more we see the similarities and differences between the situations, and the more we learn to look at underlying structures rather than the nit-picky details of a problem.  They can be dealt with later, if need be.

So contextualising everything is, I think, questionable.  I appreciate the reasons why it is believed necessary to contextualise things – it is supposed to give them meaning, and thereby provide links in the learner’s mind that help with memory and understanding, but I think mathematics is different.

Mathematics isn’t as fact-heavy as many other subjects.  Yes, there is a lot of what is often described as content, but look at them closely and see that they are skills more than facts.  You don’t learn mathematics by remembering things, you learn by doing.  It is strongly based on procedural, not declarative, knowledge.

I could get lynched by my colleagues here, but I’m going to go ahead anyway.  The two most important academic subjects in school are mother tongue and mathematics.  Why do I say that?

Because development of a strong mother tongue is essential since it is through language that we communicate, which is a fundamental human skill.  How can we describe and understand complex ideas if we do not have a rich linguistic structure?

And it is through mathematics that we learn logic, we learn rational though, we learn procedure and problem-solving. From these ideas we can develop skills of critical thinking, data analysis, understanding of cause and effect.  You could almost say that mathematics provides the skeleton, the framework upon which our minds function.  We all know the frustration of speaking to someone who can’t follow an argument from start to finish, of someone who can’t see the obvious in front of them, of people who are so credible they believe what the papers tell them.  These are skills which are developed through mathematical study.

So I don’t want to give my students wrong ideas about mathematics.  I want my students to learn to love mathematics for its own self, for its own beauty.  The fascination of solving a challenge.  Those ‘Oh. Oh!  OH!  NOW I see!  But of course!  That’s easy!’ moments.  And I’m not convinced that’s done by focusing on the real-world.

Having said ALL that, I was having this discussion with a colleague who mentioned Foucalt, and how he argued that everything in mathematics does have a context if we look at what was going on at the time those ideas were being developed.  We need to consider the economic and political situations at the time which resulted in different research being funded.  My immediate reaction is to say that there may be some merit in that, but that a lot of school mathematics is ancient stuff which is far too basic to reach those levels at which that sort of research is taking place.  Maybe not – I mean sure, there’s a context for calculus, we can easily discuss the historical issues that drove its discovery.  But that’s upper-end of school stuff (outside the MYP in fact).  What do we we do for multiplication, basic number properties, degrees in a triangle, solving simple equations?

So maybe that’s what context would end up being – the history of mathematics (well, that’s just marvelous, I’ve been wanting to study that for YEARS!)

I would really, really, really appreciate contributions if anyone has anything to comment.  Am I completely mad?  Can anyone suggest good avenues of research that would help me contextualise the mathematics taught between the ages of 11-16 years of age?

Let me know what you think

Ok, so how do I plan according to the new MYP ideas then?

So I’m going to teach functions to grade 10 now, starting in about 5 minutes when they finish their test.  I know how to do this, I’ve done it several times before, it’s not really that difficult to do.  There’ll be loads of discussion, playing around with ideas, analogies with machines, discussion of how functions are useful – in computing, for example, and in the unique nature of their solutions, etc.

But according to the new MYP plan we’re supposed to consider content with context at the same time, and that’s where I’m stuck.  What’s the context for this?  The present unit plan has the guiding question “how can we combine graphs and algebra to solve problems?” but I’m not convinced by it, and the Area of Interaction(AoI) is Approaches to Learning, which I’m not convinced by either.

Following on from some thoughts from last night and the presentation from Module 1, I’m wondering how to do this.  What exactly is the context here, that’ll generate the guiding question?  Or is the guiding question in fact a good one and I just need to think about it more.

FOLLOW ON

Well, I went with the guiding question as mentioned above, but I also added Human Ingenuity to the mix.  Why?

Consider why we have algebra?  What is its purpose?  Algebra is a tool for generalization, we use it to describe situations in a way that moves away from the numbers (if there are any) and looks at the relationships between the elements involved (the variables).  This means that if we learn to search for the structure in a problem, we are generalizing.  Solve one problem, you’ve solved all varieties of the problem, everything else is just arithmetic really.  And other similar problems can be solved by adapting this solution.

How did I illustrate this in class?  I started throwing a board marker at the kids, who then threw it back to me.  Then (and here’s me the pacifist) I started talking about bows and arrows, and cannonballs and throwing things up in the air, World War 1 and how they had to start using mathematics to make sure they could hit the bombers.  They’re all variations of a simple mathematical idea the Greeks found fascinating – the parabola.  Solve one problem, apply your solution to the other problems.  (Yes, I know, it’s just a tad more complicated than that, but the general idea certainly holds).

And why the two AoIs?  Well, generalization is certainly an approach to developing understanding.  Analyze a problem until you can generalize it and you should understand it.  And graphs are a visual means of understanding data, many trends only become apparent when you look at a graph.  Think about a parabola, who would have thought the numbers 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, … form such a smooth pattern.  So I guess that’s kind of the Approaches to Learning aspect.

And Human Ingenuity?  Well, isn’t that all about our creative powers, how we work with the world around us and adapt it to our needs and desires?  Well, this field of mathematics is fundamental to our ability to do that, development of good algebraic skills helps us learn to rationalize and organise.

What do you think?  I still think it’s relatively contrived, but I haven’t come up with a more appropriate context yet.

How can blogging be useful for professional learning and/or for students?

Well, certainly taking the time to write something knowing that other people are potentially going to read it is a factor.  If I simply think about something on my own, maybe I don’t develop the ideas very much, but when writing or typing them I have to structure my thoughts more.  So there’s definitely some elements of how it can help my professional learning – by encouraging me to dedicate more time to thinking about what I’m learning and finding ways to clearly express it.  It’s just like being a student, except that I’m both the teacher and the student: you learn more about something the more you have to explain it to people.

As for students?  Well, a couple of years ago I had a blog going with a class I was teaching and it was amazing.  Sure, there were some teething problems at first with learning how to blog mathematical symbols, but that was a minor issue (for that class, anyway)  Over the course of the year it became an excellent tool, students really felt that it was having an effect on them, by having to review lessons carefully in order to explain them on the blog, then going over them in detail, they picked up on a lot.  Many said that although they hadn’t understood it the first time around, by the time they’d written about it everything became much clearer.

I remember using that same idea for my own studying at university.  My notes were a disaster.  Sure, I dated the pages, and they were relatively neatly written, but then they just ended up in a pile on my desk.  Admittedly, I didn’t really need to refer to them that much, the benefits of a good memory, but when it came to revision time at the end of the year, I had to do something.  I had a pile of papers about a foot high with notes from every course I’d been on.

I went to the university shop and bought several copies of their hardback notebooks.  A4, ruled pages, university logo on the front – nice books.  And then I rummaged through the pile of notes to find the first pages, and proceeded to transcribe them.  Carefully.  Titles, underlining things with a ruler, diagrams carefully done with a pencil, everything.  I may even have used a fountain pen, I can’t remember.  Thing is, I found that I couldn’t keep writing if I wasn’t understanding what I was writing.  So I’d have to stop, and track back until I could pick up the thread again, and work my way through things carefully until it all made sense again, and then I could continue.

It worked really well, and I’d recommend it to anyone.  A blog could be a modern day alternative for that sort of thing.  I’ve been wanting to start using blogs again for a while, it didn’t happen last year for technical reasons, but should be easier this year.  Problem is that access to technology in the classroom here is much more limited than where I was previously, meaning that it’s not such an easy thing to pull up the class blog and refer to things students have done.  Will it truly come to life if we can’t bring it into the classroom easily?

I don’t know.  I’m almost ready to start them up though, need to pick a suitable class and go with it.  I’m trying to decide whether to use them as journals – we’re using Moodle, so each student could have their own personal blog, or we could have a course blog where a different student each day records the lesson.  Considering some of the issues with inattention on behalf of certain individuals, I think this could be QUITE interesting.

And in terms of developing their communication and reflective skills that are fundamental aspects of MYP evaluation, I think blogging could be an ideal tool.  I’m not sure I would formally evaluate their writing, but certainly give constructive feedback, I’d also like to encourage students to respond to each others comments.  Dave Wees, who I worked with before when I had the blogging class, has something like this going with his students here.  This is the sort of thing I’d like to get my students doing, I think they get so much out of it, and I think it could be very powerful in terms of improving their self-motivation and enjoyment of the subject.

Actually, as I’m thinking here (faster than I can type, unfortunately) I can see real benefits for students.  So many have weak study skills, and do little to nothing in terms of reflection outside the classroom.  So a blog which is public (within a certain environment) and which is expected and commented on could work really well in developing a habit of review and reflection.  I’ve really got to get going with this!

Task IM1 – Workshop aims and outcomes

• Which outcomes will bring me the greatest professional learning about MYP?

Well, the 5 modules are:

• Module 1 - The MYP model of assessment
• Module 2 - Creating a five year assessment framework
• Module 3 - Assessing student performance
• Module 4 - Recording and reporting assessment data
• Module 5 - Organizing for effective assessment

Well, I’m not really sure which one I’ll get the most out of.  I’ve alrady been working with the MYP for 3 years and although I’ve not been on any courses about it, I’ve picked up quite a lot over that time.  Plus it speaks to me very closely in what I consider good education anyway, so it fits me nicely.

I’ve already been part of a process of creating assessment frameworks, but I haven’t lead the process and it’s something I need to work with right now, so I’m hoping to get a lot from that one.   Number 3 is a doozy – it’s always easy in maths to fall back on traditional assessments such as tests and investigations (how traditional are they?) but I know I (we) are (often) not very good at using a wider range of assessment tools.  I’d like to really get to grips discussing (arguing) merits of different tools from a very subject specific point of view – I mean, I know presentations can be a great tool, but how useful are they in mathematics and should they be used for the formal assessment process, or just as formative assessment throughout the term/semester?  For example – and there’s many more.

I think maybe that overlaps somewhat with module 4, so there’s plenty to be going on with there.  I guess I really feel I’ll be getting plenty from each of the modules.

• Are there any other outcomes that I specifically need to focus on to help me with my own context?

Erm….. all of them?  Yeah, I reckon.  That sounds about right.  They are all areas I’m particularly interested in right now.

MYP Course

Well, I was given the chance to take an MYP online course and considering that

1. I’ve never been on an MYP course, and
2. It looked interesting,

I took up the offer.

They suggest keeping a blog with reflections etc, and considering I’ve already got this one I thought yeah, why not.  Much more fun than writing everything down, and maybe people reading this will feel like adding comments as we go along.  If not, well it’s a record for me I can look back on as I wish.