Reflections

It's occurring to me that I ought to be using this space more often to record reflections, so here's a first start...

Yesterday, in a course team meeting, the most experienced veteran (who is, I think, actually quite good, knows his math stone cold, might or might not be adaptive-- I can't say yet-- and is clearly not afraid to try new things) noticed that I was recording minutes/notes of the team meeting. That set him off a little, not at me but at the administrative burden involved in the existence of the notes: all this fuss, he was concerned, eats into his time for planning today's lessons. Fair point, I thought. So, it occurred to me that part of why I think that the common planning/common assessments/group reflections around analysis of student work isn't an undue burden, in part because it's built into the fabric of how I plan and teach. And, if it were a burden, I probably wouldn't do it.

So, I extended that thought, to include the veteran, saying "If we're doing this common planning right, it doesn't have to be a whole new thing-- a lot of this should be about documenting what we do, and it doesn't have to mean changing everything. How do you normally assess your students?"
"I give a test every week."
"Okay, would you be willing to do that next week, and share that test with us, and the rest of us will use it too?"
"Yeah, that'd be fine."
"Great! So, let's do that next week, and we'll see if any of us have any concerns or problems with it-- if so, we can tweak it, but for now, let's all just give it a once-through, using your test."

That gave us room to talk about what content we're looking to teach next, and our veteran (who has, in my short time here, been pretty spotty about attending and participating in meetings) ran and got his materials, and we talked about what we'll teach next week and how we'll teach it. Today, he dropped into a meeting that most of the rest of our team was in, and said that he expects to have his test done by this Friday, so that we can build our lessons around what we'll be assessing.

That's exciting.


The college algebra course is starting to move in a direction that I'm more happy with, too: we're looking at wrapping up this really dry content (quadratic functions), and are starting to think about our next topic, which we've decided will be mathematical modeling (a HUGE favorite of mine), using as many projects as we can to have students gathering and analyzing data, and fitting it to linear, quadratic, sinusoidal, inverse-square and other functions. That's VERY exciting.


I also feel like I'm making some real pedagogical progress with my students-- eleven instructional days in, and I feel like I'm getting to know them well enough that some real teaching and learning can take place. Right now, it's all a bit tricky, because I believe that I'm still breaking down how they've been trained to approach mathematics, and there's a lot of very slow movement, and a lot of me pushing students to not just DO the math, but to UNDERSTAND it... but I think it's on the right track.

I'm not ready, yet, to attempt the "skill-less lesson", that is, an entire unit taught from a purely conceptual point of view, never teaching an algorithm or skill, but focusing on the conceptual and seeing if students will develop the skills themselves. I think I blogged about this idea before-- I'll check, and if not, then I'll add it in here soon.