York Region's Biggest Conference - QUEST - My Reflections as a Presenter and Delegate

Well.  Here I am, after I delivered a workshop last Friday  and spent some time on the playground, exhorting the importance of blogging -  and... I'm blogging.  Sounds very hypocritical doesn't it?

Except, I was mostly presenting "STUDENT" blogging.  I was trying to encourage other educators, even myself, to continue on this journey of student blogging so that my students wouldn't just be writing for me or for marks, but rather write for a global, authentic audience.

And yes, even my workshop contained a global audience.  I always 'heard' that QUEST was becoming quite an international conference.  I could see that it was from the keynote speakers that were invited, but how about the participants?  Well, I used something called pear deck, which allowed me to interact with my audience members as they moved their red dot on their device to where they lived - now granted, I had 41 responses out of 60, and some of those responses were apparently from off the coast of Antarctica and the north pole, but I would hazard that most of these responses were accurate:

I then outlined a few ways to guarantee student and/or adult comments and views.  This would then encourage some intrinsic motivation to write.  Here's the handout:

I went to George Couros' session at the beginning of the QUEST conference on blogging to see if my presentation would overlap and it didn't.  However, as he was speaking, I realized, I probably should present his point of view. 

You see, I'm an introvert.  And he's like an extrovert.

He's convinced me to blog about my teaching and to create a portfolio of my progress as a teacher.  I am now, putting on my mask of extroversion, as Susan Cain would put it so that I can champion the things that I value the most - education.

As I was presenting my workshop, I started to convince myself of George Couros' words and here I am executing it.  I am now blogging.  My own workshop transformed me.

I hope it changed others as well. 

EDIT:  I just received a general congratulatory note from the organizer of Quest:  "Numerous congratulatory emails sent to me internationally, nationally and locally confirm the excellent planning, preparation, and delivery of Deep Learning in a Digital World. Keynote Speakers share with me their ‘WOW’!!! "  It makes me a little happy to be a part of this conference.

EDIT2:  Here is my QUEST workshop description to save it in my portfolio

Grade 8 Parents' Night

Hundreds of parents and students descended at our school just to see what Pierre Elliott Trudeau has to offer.  They want to compare our school with the other options out there - the Catholic board or private schools.

I found a few helpful students and we spent most of the time just preparing a room for that would show the parents and students the different math pathways.  Presenting the different math pathways available would benefit the parents and students no matter which school they chose.

We decided to set up the classroom in a way that they could 'walk' the different math pathways available and see where each pathway ends.

As a result, our school has run the transfer course for the first time.  The principal spent some efforts advertising this course at the grade 8 parents night 11 months ago.  She advertised the applied and transfer course pathway as an option for any students that scored a level 2 or below in their grade 8 math scores.  

With the applied + transfer course pathway, the students are exposed to 1.5 credits of math rather than just the 1.0 credits in the academic grade 9 pathway.

There's no way to tell if this applied + transfer course of 1.5 credits is enough to prepare them for grade 10 academic.

This scares me more than their EQAO scores.

Which I guess, in many ways, a good thing.  I'm more concerned about their transition than their EQAO scores.

In my younger years, I'd care too much about their EQAO scores .   I've now realized that if I take care of them as students, the EQAO scores will take care of themselves.  EQAO is subset of what and how they should learn.

I'll be sure to track their success next year.

PS:  The best part of the night was watching a few students explain to the parents what the math clubs and math education is all about.  It's interesting to hear of their experiences.

Causality vs Causation and an Intro to Graphing

The second spiral was a short introduction to relations.  I started off with the concept of a rate, and created my own version of the "pumping gas" problem from Mr. Orr's "tap into teen minds". 

One of the best things that Mr. Dan Meyer stated about this was how the video can be used as a 'hook'.  Boy, did I underestimate the power of this hook.  Combine this hook with open ended questions, and Dan Meyer was absolutely correct - all sorts of learners participated, even the weaker math students.

The video even out the playing field and it was magical to have such engagement in an applied classroom.  In all of my eight years of teaching (I know, I'm young), I have never, ever seen this.

Another thing that has me pleasantly surprised - were the questions being asked.

"What car is it?"
"How many litres can your car hold?"
"How many litres did you put in?"
"How big is your car?"


"How much did you pay?"


It is so intriguing as some of these questions did not come to my mind, yet each of them are indeed connected to math.  In many ways, my converging mindset could only think of the one question I really wanted (ie:  what is the price of gas per litre?)  I must work on my divergent thinking.

After a day of rates, we went on to the topic of scatterplots.  Now understanding the importance of a hook, I started the students off with a 30 second paragraph of Tyler Vigen's graphs of spurious correlations

The causality vs correlation issue is often a huge source of consternation for those who frequent the forums online, and I just wanted to introduce this common pitfall. 

Hence, my Friday assessment of scatterplots and rates was chicken and crude oil related, much to the delight of some of my students.  Or chagrin.  I'm still learning to read some of them one month through.

On a side note, a few of my students were trying to force a connection in this above relationship depicted by the line graph to make sense and ventured a hypothesis thinking that the chicken was being cooked in the crude oil. 

My mind is still blown that I have such a high engagement level. 

I'm proud of the students.  Let's see how long we can keep this up.

Look ahead:  I'm spiraling back to the Pythagorean theorem by starting off week 4 with  perimeter of composite shapes.  Now that we've completed an initial assessment and a reassessment of week 1, I know exactly who to target tomorrow for individual help.  This is an incredible advantage of the spiral curriculum. 

Assessment of the First Spiral

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.

Intro to Pythagorean Theorem

Today, I have officially decided to follow and jump on the Dan Meyer bandwagon by introducing a problem using his 3-acts.  However, I have more specifically jumped on Mr. Orr's bandwagon, as he seems to be the Canadian version of Dan Meyer from what I've read on his blog.

To start myself off on this 3-act business, I have copied Mr. Orr's video on "Corner 2 corner" with this video below:

I requested that the students write down any questions that come to mind - even non-mathematical ones.  I had some trouble amalgamating their questions as well as leading them to the question that did matter - but I have tremendous students that eventually got to the question I wanted:  what's the length of the room from the top corner to bottom corner? 

My favourite part of the whole exercise is the estimation portion.  As per Dan Meyer, it's best to ask students to answer the following:

•  What's a number that's too low? 
•  What's a number that's too high?  
•  What's the exact measurement?

Take a look:

We then discussed a plan of how to find the length of the string.  With some guidance, a couple got the concept.  Reinforcement is definitely necessary tomorrow.  

Instead of giving all the measurements, I felt that my 9s needed some movement - so I split them up into groups and they went about counting the tiles on the ground to calculate the width and length of the class.

We finished it off with some calculations and got the answer.  We have two people who guessed very close to the answer!

I'd say my first 3-act execution was somewhat of a success.  Let's hope I improve on the next one!

Activating Prior Knowledge

Well - here I go, trying to spiral my way through 9 applied math.  First day started with some serious structure laid down in hopes of preventing those inevitable fires that come about in the oncoming months.

As one of my favourite colleagues from MDHS often described teaching - it's "trench warfare out here." I certainly laid a dug a deep trench and it started well.  My students and I battled the math together on the first day.

We started with some prior knowledge activation as was suggested by my fellow colleague Ms. Phan out in Ottawa-Carleton District School Board suggested that I do.

Here are some of the results of today's prior knowledge activation in which they tried to brainstorm as many topics as possible and categorize them under different levels of confidence.  

Spaces with Space with Volcanoes on the Pacific Rim

As you are approaching your final exams (not all of you...I'm looking at you grade 11s) with less than enthused study sessions, may I present to you some beautiful finds in the past month.

GoPro and SpaceX
SpaceX attached a GoPro camera to their falling module.  Just to see the Earth in all of its beauty in the resolution and motion that a GoPro can capture makes me feel like I myself am floating on the edge of the atmosphere.  The waltz music almost makes me forget about the heat and friction that accompany the falling back towards Earth - I was kind of looking forward to seeing that portion of the fall, but SpaceX elected to cut that out.

Feast your eyes, and then please go back to studying.

Star Party
Around 20 parents and students came on out two nights ago to watch Chris Vaughan of the Dunlop Observatory setup three telescopes to watch the night sky for almost 3 hours.  He was such a wealth of knowledge taking us from a pair of binary stars to swans to even spotting the ISS.  He masterfully had us observe Venus, then Jupiter, and then followed the ecliptic to find a third planet - Saturn!  I look forward to working with Chris again, and hopefully we can book him for another season to observe a different night sky.

Volcanoes

Remember how the study of Earth is also a part of the course?  Did you hear that our guest Chris Vaughan (see above) couldn't get a summer job after first year when he didn't have any geology courses, but after second year in university where he elected to take geology courses, he and all of his friends got summer job offers?  Don't neglect the geology portion of the course ladies and gents.  Here is a reminder of the power of our very own Earth shown in this Mount Shindake volcano video in which Japan raised the volcano alert level to 5, which is the highest on the scale.

NASA Mission to Europa

Looks like there's a mission to Jupiter's moon and they've chosen 9 instruments to help determine if this moon is habitable.  Guess which instruments they are?  (we've studied a couple of them in class!)

Hey, you're still here?  You should be studying...or blogging.