SPRING BREAK!

Happy spring break 2014! 

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm going on an awesome spring break cruise to the Bahamas. This means I will be out of cell phone and internet service for five days. Perfect vacation from everything in my opinion! 

Anyway, this means there won't be a technique of the week post, so I want to instead ask for your ideas! What should we talk about in the future? Any thoughts? 

Ending Boredom with Engaging Activities

It's a constant struggle to engage students in a way that makes them want to learn. Part of the problem is that each teacher only has so much creativity and so much time. It's hard to hit a roadblock when trying to design an engaging lesson or activity to use in the classroom. 

What I've got: With extremely low test scores in math, I felt that I needed to cover some often forgotten concepts before TCAP this year. I knew the students would probably be doing similar reviews in other classes and wouldn't be looking forward to it. I decided the best way to get students engaged (and actually learn something) was to have stations for students. This would allow students to work at their own pace and cover as much material as possible. I tried to make each station cover a different concept in a different way. 

• 3 Memory game stations (3D shapes, 2D shapes, and angles)                     
• 2 "Order the Numbers" stations where numbers were put on cups and students had to put the cups in order from least to greatest (Comparing radicals, scientific notation)
• 1 Connection station where students connected graphs with their equations using markers (graphing inequalities)
• 2 worksheet stations (Pythagorean's Theorem, Finding Area of Complex Shapes)

There may have been too many stations in too short of a time, but the students genuinely seemed to enjoy themselves. It would have helped to have a bit more room because it was hard for students to find all of the stations. Overall, I would say it was a success though!

What have you done in your classroom that worked really well to engage students? Did you try something that didn't work? Have you seen something that you haven't tried, but want to? 

Week 1: Creative Test Alternatives

Creative Test Alternatives

Test anxiety, proctoring, grading, corrections, retakes...  Tests are time consuming and sometimes quite boring. What ideas can teachers try for testing their students on material without following the ritualistic pencil and paper, pass or fail testing that we're so used to?

What I've got: 

Checkpoints

• 10 question tests (3 per semester) that cover the bare minimum of what standards students need to know and understand. 
• Students know EXACTLY what is on them because you give them a practice checkpoint with questions that look identical (in math, just different numbers...get creative for another subject... it must be possible). When I gave out my first checkpoint, the students were confused because the practice looked exactly like the quiz. 
• They must retake the checkpoint until they get at least an 8/10 (I give them 2 tries in class). 
• Questions are graded right or wrong; no partial credit. The kids hate it, but they are allowed to retake them as many times as they want for full credit. So, for a lot of kids, this means they retake them two or three times to ensure a 100% on a small test grade.

*At Golden, they used these as a bare minimum to pass the class.  If you pass all three and the Checkpoint final (20 questions taken from the 3 checkpoints), you pass the class with a 60%.  

Why are these so wonderful you ask? Instead of students failing the test, accepting it, moving on, and then coming back at the end of the semester asking how they can get their grade up, students are forced to keep working on the material until they get at least a basic grasp of what is going on.  Plus, they don't get quite the test anxiety when they're not surprised, yet they're tested on what they need to know. 

Now, it's your turn to respond.  This could mean 

• something you already do in your classroom
• something you'd like to try in your classroom
• something you've heard about or seen someone else do
• a link to a website with cool ideas
• a brainstorm of things you could do, but don't really know much about

Get the idea?