Author: Jon Orr

Updating the MFM1P Spiral

by Jon Orr

“Have you taught for 25 years? Or have you taught one year 25 times?”

I don’t think I’ve taught the same course the same way ever. Why would we? We don’t have the same kids in front of us. And especially with the resources at our finger tips from our colleagues inside and outside of our schools. I’ve wrote before about the power of #mtbos and it changes the way you teach.

I started spiralling the MFM1P course a few years ago with Kyle Pearce. Since then I’ve taught that course 3 or 4 semesters in row…..and never the same way. New amazing lessons and tools are springing up. For past lessons I wasn’t completely happy with I’ve got to see if this new lesson or that lesson will help my students understand the concepts more deeply.

One change I wanted to make was to include solving equations earlier in the course. In my old plan I waited to introduce it after introducing linear relations. But, after teaching solving equations using the Double Clothesline and the puzzle nature of learning it that way….I can introduce it now and continually practice our skills through warm ups.

If you want to follow along as my day-to-day plan unfolds follow this link! If any of you have been spiralling MFM1P I would love compare notes, or see your plans.

 

 

 

Road Trip – MEL3E Day 9

by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up we played the game of NIM. I started this off by saying “I’m the undisputed champion of Southern Ontario on the game we’re going to play. I’ll give $10 to any player who beats me!!” I put down the bill on the table!

Game of NIM in our classroom:

There are two players. There are 21 sticks in a pile. Players take turns. A player can choose to take 1 or 2 or 3 sticks from the pile. The player that takes the last sticks wins!

Easy enough game? My students thought so and were eager to win $10. I played 2 rounds each with a different student in front of the class. They couldn’t believe that I had won both times at such an easy game. I let them in on the secret so they could go off and play and win against their friends or parents.

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If you can leave your opponent with a multiple of 4 …you win….so with 21 sticks you can always win if you go first.

Next up we are switching strands to Travel and Transportation. I started with having them split their whiteboard down the middle. On one half they wrote “I notice”. On the other side they wrote the heading “I wonder”.

I showed this short clip and asked them to write down anything they noticed and anything they wondered.

I gave them 2-3 minutes to write down their noticings and wonderings. Next they had 2 minutes to share that with their partners. Then they shared with the group. At first they were pretty shy to share with the group….but once we got rolling…….they wondered a lot!!
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I explained that the “oh no” in the video was said because driving to SF looked super long! We had a great lengthy discussion about travelling by car. A few stories from me and also from them! The list of wonderings they generated will fuel our work for this part of the course! We will come back to driving costs and owning a vehicle costs next cycle…..this time around we’re going look at travelling by Air, Bus, Train. We’ll read schedules, learn about time zones, and read 24 hour clocks.

Today’s focus –and as it turns out Monday’s too– was on air flight. We broke out the iPads and looked up flights to SF. I handed out a recording sheet.

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Most students hadn’t searched sites like Expedia or Travelocity before so we went slowly. We’ll resume this activity on Monday and we may get to doing some problems with the World Clock and the 24 hour clock.

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2 weeks done! Happy Friday!

 

MEL3E – Day 8

by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up was another from Mary Bourassa’s Warm Up booklet (couldn’t find it on the wouldyourathermath.com site). screen-shot-2016-09-15-at-2-14-54-pm

Again I asked for the “gut check”! Almost all students said they wanted the dimes….”because dimes are worth more!” I asked if they needed anything else before they began. They insisted that the needed the weights of the coins…so we looked them up. Discovered that a dime weights 1.75 grams and a nickel weighs 3.95 grams. I assigned each pair to a vertical board to solve the problem with one marker. I circulated to help those that needed hints. As a hint I found myself acting out with my hands :”If the pile of dimes is 119g and I take out 1 dime the pile is lighter by 1.75g…..how many times can I do this before the pile is empty?” I think using my hands to act this out showed them that I was dividing up the pile. It led to them recognizing they needed to use division. Once they realized that no more hints were really needed.

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I’m pretty sure we could teach this whole course through Would You Rather problems.

For the remainder of class we continued the quiz and mastery day from yesterday. We had some connectivity issues today with the wifi so not a ton was done using the Freshgrade app.

Tomorrow we’re going to switch gears and look at the Transportation & Travel Strand.

 

Mastery Day – MEL3E Day 7

by Jon Orr

Today was our first Mastery day. It’s a day where the students get a chance to improve on their skills. In their previous math classes it’s most likely that when they had a test or assignment their teacher marked it and then that mark went in their gradebook and it stayed there all year. So that’s great if I aced that assignment. Not so great if I did poorly on that assignment. Especially in this course, ideas and skills carry forward (and backward) from strand to strand. So…our mastery days are designed so that a student can choose an area of the course that they feel they need to improve upon….and then if they show me improvement I go to my gradebook and update their grade.

This means that our gradebooks change from recording test marks……to recording their progress/knowledge level on the specific expectations of the course (Check out Standards Based Grading in math here, here, and here).

For out first mastery day we had some setup to do. I am trying a new tool (for me) called FreshGrade. It’s an online student portfolio tool that also has a gradebook!!!!  What drew me to this is the ability to choose a variety of different marking setups. I had my eye on setting up a marking scheme that doesn’t show the students a grade. It shows them bench marks like Approaching the expectation, Meets the expectations, Exceeds the Expectation! 

I find that most students in MEL3E are aiming for a pass……traditionally these students stop as soon as they get a grade back from the teacher! That means the learning stops! The improvement stops. And I don’t want that. So….I hold back the number grade and ask them to “make it better”. And when they may have normally packed it in on that skill….they find themselves earning marks better than they expected. I want my students to improve upon all their learning all year. I don’t want the learning to stop just because we had an assessment on it.

For the first half of the mastery day the students logged into their FreshGrade accounts. I gave a demo on what they will see in their “activity feed” on their devices.

Each “box” shows an activity that I created (my activities are the learning goals/expectations/standards for the course). They can see their current progress on that expectation under the heading “Assessment”. When they click on the “More” link they see the curriculum expectation and resources that can help them work at improvement on that expectation.

On the What’s The Best Deal expectation I included links to a few practice problems for students to try. They open them up, complete the problems, or seek help on them and if I see improvement then I go and change their progress. Today my students accessed those new questions and did their work on their desks. They took a picture of it and hit the upload button and BAAAM! we’ve got a record of their work. The students get to build their very own math portfolio!

And the beauty of the mastery day is that their learning/improvement is differentiated. Each student decides where they want to improve. If they are meeting expectations on one standard and not another….they can go and choose to upgrade that other standard. As we move through the course more and more curriculum expectations will show up in their feed which means they will get more to choose from. Students can upload work on these expectations anytime. When they do upload I get a notification to my iPad/phone showing the new work. I can assess that work right away give them either written or audio feedback and change their mark immediately!

Here is a look at the teacher side from the website:

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I see a colour coding of the classes progress. From this page I can click on a student and update their grade and then immediately update another student’s grade.

During the last 25 minutes of class I got them to complete their first quiz. It was 4 questions. I’ve sectioned off parts of the paper so I can give them feedback on what they need to fix. Everything is always fixable. Once they correct their work I’ll record their grade/progress in FreshGrade.
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Since today was the first mastery day….a good chunk of time was spent setting all this up most students didn’t finish the quiz…..so tomorrow we’ll repeat this all over again.

This is the first semester I’ll be trying FreshGrade….so we’ll see how it goes. Anyone have tips on FreshGrade? The previous 3 semesters I was using “The Spreadsheet” that myself, Kyle Pearce, and a few others modified for mastery days. Freshgrade allows me to do similar things easier. What I’m a little worried about is when that list of curriculum expectations grow…..the first few will get buried in the feed. Think of your Facebook feed. Scrolling back to a post you saw yesterday is even impossible. I’m hoping those first few won’t get forgot about because they are so far down in the feed.

More tomorrow!