Assessment

My Favourite Desmos Feature

by Jon Orr
If you follow me you know Desmos is my go-to software for graphing and calculator functions with my students. I'm pretty excited to let you know that coming soon I'll release a 3 part video series on using Desmos in the classroom to enhance classroom discussions. To get started I wanted to share my favourite Desmos feature: The Moveable Point Watch the 1 min 44 second video: Can't see the video? Click here to see the post page. Sign Up below to get notified when the 3 part series goes live. You won't want to miss it!! p.s. Here are the activities seen in the video. The Great Collide Charge: Edited Sugar Sugar Pondering Percent Pentomino Puzzles Or You can also download the free Multi-Touch Book from iBooks to use on your iPad Beautiful Functions  

Gaining Insight

by Jon Orr

As the year closes down I think back on 2017.  I was curious about some of the stats on this site and was blown away at some of the numbers. I never thought that when I started sharing what goes on in my classroom that I would have over 150000 views in a single year! Amazing….and thats all because of you! I dug a bit deeper and found the three most popular posts from this year.

  1. Angry birds Parabolas
  2. Flippity Flip Bottle Flip
  3. Spiralling Grade 9 Math

At first glance I thought, “Yeah, those top 2 posts make sense. Their kinda gimmicky and fads. We search for those relevant topics our students are into; games and bottle flips! I’m sure if I wrote a post on fidget spinners it would be up there too.”But after thinking back on those activities and comparing them I think both their value come from being able to gain great insight into student thinking. And it’s that ability to assess our students deeper thinking here that teachers are drawn to.

Take the Angry Birds lesson for example, the creativity that is embedded  throughout the lesson is everything. Students get to choose how their flight paths look and act. There’s a story behind every arc they put into their activity. Their thinking can’t help but spill out all over, and I get to use that knowledge I gain to help push them along. Take away the angry birds and you still have a great creative lesson.

Replace it with a drawing, or trace of a picture or even a marble run and students experience the exact same creativity and learning goal expectations. The activity still allows me to have those insightful conversations.

The bottle flipping activity is a formative assessment gold mine. Again take away the bottles and replace with paper balls or card tossing and this lesson is identical, and I have just as much success at seeing into my students thinking.

It’s this insight that we all want. It’s this insight we need. Insight allows us to what Kyle Pearce and I have been calling ignite our moves. Seeing how a students thinks in live time allows us to act. We may act to address a misconception. We may act to push learning further. We may act to plan our next lesson. We may act to change our planned lesson into something that the students need at that moment. Lessons that allow insight into student thinking must be our norm.

This fits with the 3rd top resource. Spiralling Grade 9 Math. The file found on this post give us a day-by-day to teach with lessons just like the ones above. Not gimmicky lessons —  Lessons that spark curiosity! They are lessons that provide great insight so I can ignite my moves and fuel my students sense making. And fuelling sense making has to be our main purpose.

Have you used any of these resources? Comment below to share how?

Fuel Sense Making & Black Box Defrost

by Jon Orr

Sparking Curiosity:

I put this video on infinite loop while the students filed into the class. I let it play and said “here is your warm up today”

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I said nothing else. I was letting the curiosity build. After it looped and looped students started to work. Without saying a word about it students were trying to find how long it will take to defrost an item that weighed 3.5 pounds.

Igniting MY Moves:

Since I routinely let students struggle to solve problems instead of showing them immediately a “how to”, I have to be ready to give feedback on what they try on the fly. I want to help push them in not only a direction that solves the problem but prepares them to see solutions that are not their own and solutions that attempt to address our learning goal for that day. That takes careful planning which is not an easy thing. 
“Plan with Precision so you can proceed with great flexibility” – Tom Schimmer.
When I first started teaching so much of my planning was solely focused on answering questions like, What topic? What examples?, and How long do I spend on it? Now my planning time is mostly spent trying to answer: How will the students solve this problem? How can I use what they will do to shape the lesson? What do their attempted solutions tell me about what they have learned so far? So my planning process has gone from examples like this where I was so concerned with WHAT….
to spending most of my time thinking about HOW. HOW will the students respond to the task? What does that look like? That takes a ton of anticipation. Anticipating their solutions and strategies puts me in a better position to understand their thinking and help shape that thinking. For each possible attempt I need to be ready to provide feedback to help them achieve our goals.
For the Defrost Black Box problem from above the learning goal I am hoping to pull out is “Relations can be represented in various ways” and “Problems can be solved in a variety of ways” I anticipated that some of my students would attempt to solve it with a unit rate.
Possibly some of my students may solve it with a table of values and linear relation.
Some may set up a proportion.

The book 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions has been an invaluable guide to help me re-design my planning time.

Fuel Sense Making

Since my goal is for students to see “Relations can be represented in various ways” and “Problems can be solved in a variety of ways”
I need to be ready to fuel their sense making by linking the different student strategies together.
Here are some of what the students tried.

I did not anticipate students using seconds.

I also did not anticipate students using additive thinking with the unit rate.

We learn so much from our students by allowing them to show their thinking. Imagine all the missed conversations with my students from 2005 – 2013. Imagine how many of my students felt like they were failures because their brains didn’t tell them to solve those problems the same way the I did. When in reality they had so many good insights that just needed to be tailored.
Selected students presented their strategies to the class. Now it was time to show how their strategies connect together.
We showed how the unit rates that many of them found and used showed up the table solution.
We moved from there to show how this would be represented on our number lines. 
Yes the planning that comes from Igniting My Moves and Fuel Sense Making takes time and it is not easy. But I can tell you that it is worth it.
On a side note: Help me settle a problem. A teacher said, “Students might find a real microwave more engaging than the fake one you have shown.”
Is version 2 of the Black Box Defrost more engaging or worth doing more because it is real? What are your thoughts?
Version 2: The More Real version

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Thanks for reading!

Conall’s Assessment Story

by Jon Orr

As part of a presentation on assessment in math class I put together a short video explaining some key elements for assessment in my classes. When I was thinking about creating this video a certain young man in my class kept standing out in my mind. This video is really his assessment story. I wanted to share this video here in addition to the presentation. You can watch the video or read the transcript below.

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Transcript

Hey everybody! My name is Jon Orr, I’m a high school math teacher at John McGregor secondary school in Chatham Ontario. I want to share a short story with you about assessment in math class.

I’m sure you remember how your math classes were structured… Lessons….homework …. repeat…then tests. And your mark was created by all those test results. I ran my math class like this for about 8 years.

What sparked a change for me was when I read these simple words that are written all over the Ontario curriculum document.”By then end of the course the student will…”

 

 

End of the course??? Really? I have until the end of the course to assess our learning goals? But I had been evaluating by the end of the unit or by Sept. 23 the test date! And like every math teacher that evaluation of those skills were stuck to a student for the rest of the year regardless how they improved upon those skills. I wanted my students to learn our course content not just by Sept. 23 but just learn them! I wanted to promote growth.

I needed my assessment and evaluation policies to reflect that! I want to share them with you and to do that I want you to meet Conall!

Conall is in my grade 10 applied math class. Conall also has autism. He functions very well in my active math class. One day Each week along with his classmates Conall logs onto his Freshgrade account and waiting for him there is a list of our current learning goals. Each learning goal shows not only his current progress, but his past achievement on that skill. Conall scans through the learning goals, and chooses one that he wishes to improve upon. Here is where Freshgrade is great, it captures and holds all of his work which provides me great insight into his learning. As Conall works to improve his learning goals he uploads pictures of his work through the app. I get to see that work and provide audio or written feedback also through the web/app or in person. What I love is that I get to see all that interaction for each learning goal (expectation) forever. I can see the growth that Conall is making. I love being able to see Conall’s thinking progress as he attempt problems. It makes me as a teacher more confident about his ability on the course expectations.

For example, Conall uploaded a picture of his work on solving a proportion.

He was confused on the nature of proportional relationships. After a comment and talking with him he made corrections and re-uploaded. That progression of learning stays in their portfolio for us both to see! His next step is to attempt a new problem to show consistency. And then he moves on to a different learning goal! We do this each week … ALL YEAR LONG!

Time is no longer a factor. Conall doesn’t have to compete with the rest of the class on his learning. He doesn’t get penalized because he couldn’t master the concepts by a specified date. This assessment structure gives more power to Conall while at the same time makes him take more ownership in his own learning. He has choice!He has to assess himself on each goal to know where to improve next.

But that routine isn’t just for conall….its for the entire class. Everyone uses their portfolio to push themselves and show their learning.

“Assessment is power not punishment” * in my class and that helped Conall and many of my students be successful this year.

Thank you

* Quote adapted from “Math is power not punishment” – Dan Meyer