engagement

My #1 Go-To Tool In Math Class

by Jon Orr

Let’s start with this one question:

For me, I use a set of 4 criteria to evaluate all resources, tools, and lesson ideas. It helps me quickly narrow down whether a tool will help me achieve the desired results I look for in my classroom.

Here are the four criteria.

  1. I want ALL my students to show me their thinking and understanding in interesting ways. I want them to show me what they think first instead of just telling them what to think! I want to open up the questioning that goes on in my room. So I look and create lessons that allow for this.
  2. I want my students to discuss, collaborate, argue, defend, and justify with each other. I believe this helps clarify their learning and understanding so I must make sure that discussion and collaboration happen in my best lessons.
  3. I am always assessing for growth! I’m constantly looking to see who gets what we are doing and who needs help. I need to be able to assess quickly the abilities in my room so I can use that on the fly to decide where to go next. Assessing easily must be apart of my lessons.
  4. Every lesson or activity must have a ratio between the cost of set up and the payoff where the payoff heavily out weighs the set up. Nothing is worse than spending a huge chunk of time, making, cutting, designing and then when you run it the learning outcome wasn’t worth it. The payoff must out weigh the set up.

My #1 Go-To tool/technique is WHITEBOARDS!! Having my students work in random pairs daily at vertical whiteboards is the tool that easily allows my students to get to work faster and hit all four of my criteria.

How do whiteboards stack up against my criteria?

 

On a whiteboard students can easily show off their learning. They are quicker to get to writing on a whiteboard than on paper. Especially when the boards on the wall. Students get to defend, argue, justify their thinking with each other. I can easily see if students are understanding and the set up ratio is a no brainer. Here’s a whiteboard, marker….Go!

I’ve had students use small personal whiteboards at their desks before, but I couldn’t believe the change in active engagement and cooperation once they were standing. The discussions they were having about the math was much more insightful and meaningful.

Our whiteboard work usually starts as soon as the bell rings. In random pairs students would put up a few homework questions from the previous day. I could see students looking around verifying their work with their peers. They were self assessing.

We continue to make use of the boards while we work through our new challenges. Students have no problem leaving their space to go and talk to another group to gain some insight on new strategies….This is how we create great classroom culture. I can easily circulate the room to engage students in conversations and challenge their reasoning.

 

WHITEBOARDS IN YOUR CLASSROOM

Recently, Kyle Pearce and I took Wipebook Chart Packs on the road with us to some conferences and district presentations for our Making Math Moments That Matter workshop series and they worked great! In a breakout session we held at The OAME Leadership Conference in 2017, we had a room of over 100 teachers, consultants, and coaches up at the walls doing a math problem with us. It was fantastic!

We had so many participants asking for more details on how to get their own Wipebook Chart Packs that they are now offering an exclusive Educator Starter Pack you can only get through us!!!

 

EDUCATOR STARTER PACK

The education starter pack includes:

  • A Wipebook Flipchart (pack of 10);
  • A Wipebook Notebook Plain;
  • A Wipebook Workbook Graph;
  • A single correctable marker; and
  • A single tri-plus marker.
Your exclusive Making Math Moments That Matter offer is 25% off the list price value!!! 
 

Full disclosure: Kyle and I love this product so much that we became affiliates for Wipebook. Which means if you purchase through our link here YOU get a discount and WE get a small percentage with no extra cost to you! Win/Win! 

Can Addresses

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USA Addresses

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***Any other country use the USA button above. 

Are you using whiteboards in your classroom? 

What is your #1 Go-To Tool?? 

Interested in learning how to assess for growth? We’ve got module 1 from our online assessment course for math teachers open for you to dive into right now!

Hurry Up/Kill Time Math Classes – How Desmos Can Help

by Jon Orr

Seth Godin brought up an interesting idea: If you think about it, everyone at the airport is in one of two modes. In a hurry, or killing time. You can imagine it right now! That impatient person in the TSA line just waiting to speed walk to the gate, or the group of people jockeying for position to board the plane first. On the other hand the only other people are just waiting around to speed up!

This is also happening in math classrooms. Both teachers and students.
Students want to hurray through lessons, get the homework done, move onto the next thing. Or they are just killing time. Teachers are hurrying up to start lessons, give examples, get the ideas out, give the homework. Some teachers are just waiting around until the day ends.

But this is not all students. Some are focused on learning to learn. And this is not all teachers. Many like you and me are actively making moments that matter in our students lives. Let’s help others slow down the “Hurry up to wait” classrooms.

One way I do this is to create and share those moments that matter through enhancing classroom discussions through a tech tool that creates discussions, not limits them like so many others do.

Watch,

 

Let’s Slow down the hurryers and energize the waiters. Let’s enhance our classrooms together. Check out a list of over 25 of my custom Desmos activities plus check out the hundreds of activities on  teacher.desmos.com  like the Pentomino Puzzles activity.

Here is a transcript of the audio in the video:

Hey, I’m Jon Orr, a math teacher from Chatham Ontario, Canada.

I’ve been on a mission lately to make moments in my math class memorable. Like you remember specific moments in your life because they were meaningful. Something that sticks with you. When I think back to my experiences as a math student I remember grade 4. I thought I was a master multiplier. My teacher even gave me stickers for doing extra work….and these stickers weren’t just normal stickers they were the ones that stand off the page like puffy stickers. You know, the ones that make the book not close all the way.

That sticks with me because of the feelings that go with the moments. I want to create those for my students; not with stickers, but memorable math moments. Like moments that students will remember years later. Like I have students years after my course still remember the toy car lesson we did or the pentomino puzzle solving lesson! I want this for every student in my class.

One tool that I think does this amazingly well is Desmos. And I’m not talking about just the online calculator. I’m talking about the earth shattering online activities that they create for us to teach with for free!

What I love is that each activity they build helps me make those moments. And they do that by allowing my students to show their thinking in interesting ways, they allow me quickly assess on the fly the abilities in my room…and they allow my students to have discussions! The tech creates discussions!

Here is one task that is great. Pentomino puzzles.

The activity is super easy to get into, just move this tile around until you cover a sum of 65. You can see students can easily share their thinking and strategies. I have kids use 1 device for 2 people so they can talk about their strategies. It keeps that collaboration I’m looking for. But then each new task builds towards solving the problems using an algebraic approach! I get kids to learn how to solve equations through this puzzling type of game!

As a teacher I get to see what student is on what screen, allowing me to help kids that need help and allow kids to move forward that are ready for it.

I can pause the screen on everyone’s devices so we can discuss strategies. The software is built to enhance classroom culture and discussions, not limit them like other tech does.

So one recommendation for you to try to make math moments matter for all your students is to explore the activities on teacher.desmos.com.

Thanks,

Find out more on desmos over on my website mrorr-isageek.com where I share all my custom made desmos activities and many other resources and ideas for your math classroom.

Take care.

 

 

What Math Lessons Can We Learn from the Game of Nim?

by Jon Orr

Have you played the game of Nim before? Do you know what lessons we can pull from the game? Watch me play the game with two of my daughters Jules and Lucie.

You can see right when the game gets to 4 left that each girl knows they lost! You can see it on their faces and even Lucie explains it to us by giving us all the options. Jules even wonders out loud “How did you do that” She knows there’s some trick here.

So, let’s see how I’m the World Champion at this game.

This game is a variation on the game of Nim

“Nim is a mathematical game of strategy in which two players take turns removing objects from distinct heaps. On each turn, a player must remove at least one object, and may remove any number of objects provided they all come from the same heap. The goal of the game is to avoid being the player who must remove the last object.” 

I also play this game with my students. The interesting thing about this game is that there is a winning strategy. And in our variation of the game if the player to go FIRST knows the winning strategy then they are guaranteed to win. So even though it looks like I’m the World Champion it just comes down to math.

Let’s explain,

Jules and Lucie know they have lost the game when they are left with 4 to choose. So as a player if you can leave 4 objects for your opponent to choose from you have won the game!! So now the game becomes who can leave 4 for their opponent to choose from. How can you always get to a position where you leave 4 for your opponent? Think about it for a moment. What number should I leave my opponent to choose from so that no matter what they do I can then leave them with 4 to choose from?

Right..l Should leave them with 8 to choose from! And then where’s my next winning position? 12 then 16 then 20. Multiples of 4!

So right from the start since there was 21 objects in the pile I can get to 20 on my first move by going first! And win the game every time.

In my class I usually put some cash down on the table to enhance the experience. “Anyone who beats me at the game will get the cash!”

Every time I play this game I’m reminded of my math education as a student. You see, in the game of Nim if you know the winning strategy you win every time. You know the path to follow. You see how it works. If you don’t know the strategy you are playing the game almost as if you are blind. You’re not sure how your choices will affect the final moves near the end. You are hoping the moves will pay off down the line.

As a student most of my math educational experience was like the experience of the player in the game of Nim that doesn’t know the strategy. I followed the teacher (who does know the “strategy”) blindly. I wasn’t sure of how my “moves” would pay off in the end. I just followed the rules hoping for good outcome.

I was such a good rule follower that sometimes it awarded me some success. In the fourth grade I remember earning one of those big puffy, stick off the page stickers for being a master multiplier. Yay go me!!

 

But when it came to being pushed to show my understanding the wheels fell off. Here is a 4th grade test on multiplying (when I look it over now it looks like I must have fixed this up after getting it back). Math for me was like a series of tricks that I could memorize and then try to perform.

 

Thinking back to playing the game with my daughters you can hear Jules, the first girl in the video ask right at the end “How did you do that?” She was thinking this is all a trick! The game was like a magic trick. How many of our students see their math education as a series of tricks? Lots of them I bet.

We don’t want kids thinking math is just a series of tricks to memorize. If they do think the math they are learning is a trick then it’s our duty to uncover the trick. Show them how it works. Like in the game of Nim students should know why the first player has the winning strategy.

This is what I want from my math lessons. Let’s continue to fuel sense making in our students instead of showing them just tricks. So, in your next class play the game of Nim with them. Blow their socks off and win 3 times in a row…..but don’t leave it as a trick. Uncover the math and strategy behind it together!

A great read is Nix The Tricks by Tina Cardone https://nixthetricks.com/

You can read more about how to fuel sense making for students from Kyle Pearce as he describes a task around Donuts.  https://tapintoteenminds.com/3act-math/donut-delight/

and also here from me showing a task about the defrost function on my microwave http://mrorr-isageek.com/fuel-sense-making-black-box-defrost/

Building Resilient & Determined Math Students

by Jon Orr

Are you frustrated with how easily some of your students just give up while doing a math problem? You know that if they just stick with it that they will learn but they just want to be hand-held through math class every day. In the book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the hidden power of character  Paul Tough argues that students succeed not because of intelligence but because of how much stick-to-it-ness, grit, and Determination they have.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. – Albert Einstein.

Tough says that you can build perseverance in children by playing chess. From the book, “Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.” Playing chess over and over builds up a chess player’s level of determination. They have to take risks and learn from those risks in order to succeed. If we want our math students to build up resilience and determination then we also have to push them take risks and learn from the outcome of those risks.

In math class we can build up resilience, grit and stick-to-it-ness if we put students in experiences where they have to persevere through a tough situation. But think of their whole math class experience up to this point. It’s likely that a student would  never have had the opportunity to try to solve a problem before we math teachers show them the examples and how to solve it the math teacher way. Our students need experience persevering through tough situations like the chess player.

Imagine the first time you play chess and your opponent takes your bishop early in the game. You might think the game is pretty much over. Why go on? Or think of the young basketball player who has the right footing for a layup. They definitely weren’t a pro at that the first few times. But over time in each situation players overcome that resistance and persevere. They learn to be successful.

But in math class we assume math students should be good problem solvers and have grit in our math classes immediately. We say “our students give up too quickly” but when did we ever give them time to build those perseverance skills up? When did we teach them how to persevere? We are the ones that have to give them experiences to build that skill up.

3 Tips to Prevent the “Give Up Moments” and Create resilient Problem Solvers

1. Routinely have students solve unfamiliar problems through a supportive productive struggle process.

Use the Hero’s Journey to structure your math class and create productive struggle moments daily for your students. As an example, if I didn’t push my students to solve these problems routinely on their own to start our lesson then they would not only miss gaining the experience to persevere 

but I the teacher would also miss gaining valuable information about what my students know or don’t know. Problem solving must be a regular part of learning not just a once a unit or end of unit thing.

2. Create an environment where risk taking is low stakes.

In order for students to take risks and learn how to persevere the stakes for failure have to be low. It has to be painless to make mistakes. How are we doing this in our math classes? One easy-to-implement technique to make risk-taking low stakes is to bring dry-erase boards into your classroom. The no-permanence of the boards makes risk taking easy and it’s one of my favourite things. Students can attempt strategies quickly and wipe away quickly if needed. You can read more about the research behind non-permanent surfaces from Peter Liljedahl.

3. Show students that you value perseverance:

Create an assessment routine that promotes growth instead grades. Students quickly learn what you value. If we’re saying to them daily that we value the process of their learning over the final answer then how to we prove it to them? Your actions speak loudly. Give your students room to show that they have persevered while solving problems. Learn how you can implement an assessment routine that promotes growth and resilience by watching Conall’s Assessment story:

Read more about promoting growth in your assessment here.

Disclaimer: This transformation won’t happen over night. You yourself have to be resilient and determined. It’s possible that you might not see that change even this semester. But by allowing students to productively struggle through problems, giving them a low stakes risk taking environment and proving to them you value persistence WILL build their resilience and determination in the long term. We also must have a stick-to-it-ness to build great thinkers!