Even though I've been teaching for eight years now, I turned everything absolutely upside down. I'm now working with a spiral curriculum, performing Dan Meyer's 3-act math on a regular basis and implementing some serious classroom management techniques that was recommended to me from my last year's mentee.
My first spiral which consisted of Pythagorean theorem, perimeter, collecting like terms, polynomials, area and distributive property was a success by my books thus far. They did well on certain portions of their assessment, but other not so well. I crunched a lot of material in 1.5 weeks, and they struggled with the last portion - distributive property. Or rather, I didn't give enough time to allow for the students to work with it.
Nonetheless - I borrowed some growing success initiatives from my science department, my wife, and another math colleague.
1) An adaptation of my science department's concurrent credit recovery policy,: if the students failed the assessment overall, they could get a second hack at the assessment. They must perform at a level 3 (~70%) for me to bring their marks (all of K, A, T, C) up to 50%.
2) Wife: Since I was devoting class time for students to have a second hack at the assessment, I allowed the other students to try to upgrade one question. My one page double sided assessment had a couple of thinking questions - one from homework which I took up and another one that was a little extension. As a result, all of my students had 'something' to work on.
3) After going through the whole assessment, students can choose to look in their binder to help them with any question that they may have trouble with. I've been trying to give students incentive to keep an organized binder, and especially with this spiral curriculum, we have topics everywhere. Well, armed with their organized binders, students can now use their binder (at the cost of 50% of the mark for the particular question), students can now and try to get the remaining 50% of the question.
No comments:
Post a Comment