Making Connections

I am wondering how many times you are in the lab and students are working so diligently on the Cognitive Tutor (because that’s what all of them do, right) when suddenly, one of your students raises their hand with a question about a problem they are working on. HA!! If your students are anything like mine lab days are even busier than classroom days!! When we are in the lab I always find myself running around like a mad woman trying to answer the 4000 different questions from the 28 different students who are trying to master 28 different sections in 28 different units with their hands constantly in the air. “Mrs. Bratcher”….“Mrs. B”….”Hey”….”I need help over here”….”Mrs. Bratcher”…..”My hand is up”….and on and on. Some days I have to stop and say “wait a minute, I am not your pet, stop calling me, just raise your hand and be patient – there is only ONE of me”!!!! (They think I’m funny.) But the most distressing part is that 90% of the time what they ask for help on is something we’ve ALREADY done in class!!!

Does anyone else know what I’m talking about out there??!!!?!?!!

Making connections from the classroom to the lab (and vice versa) is one of the HARDEST things to do. A young teenage mind (especially a male one) is still so compartmentalized. For them, what we do in the classroom is completely separate from what they work on in the lab!! And it is SO easy to forget that I need to consciously and purposefully make those connections for them. The beginning of this week we were working on Problem 5.5 Saving Money (point-slope form) and when we went to the lab the end of the week I had several students in the unit on Writing Equations of a Line (21 I think). So many of them were stuck because the scenario wasn’t just given them the rate and starting value. But once I sat down with them and we talked about what the scenario WAS giving them and how that related to the problem we had just done in class, things CLICKED!!

It works the same way in the classroom as well. When we were talking about slope-intercept form a few weeks ago I pulled up the cognitive tutor on a question where they have to graph in slope-intercept form and shot it up on the interactive whiteboard. Immediately they connected it to what we were doing in class (plus they got to work it ON the interactive whiteboard which is always “cool”).

Don’t forget as you are going through the busy-ness of each school day that THEY are not making those connections on their own, but oh what happens in their brains when you make the connections for them. Algebra suddenly starts making a whole lot more sense when it moves from being a whole bunch of dots to a connected picture of real life!!

Grouping Students in the Classroom

I must admit that the thing I struggle with most in this new way of teaching (with Carnegie) is grouping my students. I have tried multiple ways to organize my students into groups and I have YET to find a sure-fire way that keeps my classroom on task and focused all of the time (maybe that’s just an impossible goal anyway – HA). And maybe you all can help me out this week!! I’d love to hear YOUR ideas on grouping students (just make a post in the comment section if you don’t mind to share). Here are the things I’ve tried so far…

I have come to the conclusion that I like groups of three students best. I have tried groups of four, but I find that they aren’t as quick to have discussion with everyone in the group because usually what happens is they split off into groups of two and just talk with their “partner.”

Most of the time I group the students myself. Usually I use their latest test scores and I try to make sure each group has a high, medium and low student. That seems to be what works BEST (so far). Occasionally I will sort them according to where they are in the Cognitive Tutor. When I’m in the Teacher’s Toolkit I click on “View Class Progress” and when I click “Unit” it sorts the students in order according to what unit they are on. Then I just put a top student with a low student and a medium one.

One time I sorted my students by their latest test scores, but I put low with low, mediums with mediums and highs with highs. The one thing I really liked about this is that in the low groups someone had to step up and lead. A lot of times the low student in the group will just ride the coat-tails of the other members, but when they were in the group with other low students, they had to step up and figure things out. And it was really easy to differentiate some of the assignments as well. But I found myself spending way too much time with low groups.

A few times (later on in the year) I have let me students choose their own groups. I tell them up front that it is temporary and if they can behave and work well with who they have chosen they will be able to stay together. This works well for a few weeks, but inevitably they get too social and it’s harder for them to get the work done.

I have never tried any kind of random sorting, like choosing a card from a deck of choosing names from a hat. Maybe that’s because I’m too much of a control freak!!

So, what am I not thinking of?? What are YOU doing to sort YOUR students? I’d love to hear from you!!

Test Generator

I cannot tell you how excited I was when Carnegie announced last year that they were converting the “Student Assessments” on the Resource Center from PDF’s to Word Documents!! That meant that I could actually redesign my assessments any way that I wanted to from the comfort of my computer, instead of doing it the old fashioned way and literally cutting and pasting the parts of the assessment I wanted to keep. But when I actually opened one of the assessments to modify for the first time I realized that cutting and pasting might have actually been easier than removing and/or editing the text on the tests. Everything seemed to be “grouped” and it is very hard to move things or change the size of something or even delete something without deleting things you want to keep. Needless to say it wasn’t as “user friendly” as I was hoping!

BUT THEN……but then I got an email the beginning of this year from my sales rep just to let me know that Carnegie had now developed a Test Generator. And although I was a little skeptical at first, let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, that my prayers have been answered!! What a wonderful tool it is; much more easy to use than the word files in the Resource Center. They have compiled EVERY question from EVERY student assessment, skills practice, assignment and even the homework helper all into a huge database for you to randomly or purposefully generate assessments. All of this is run by a program called ExamView which many of you are familiar with and I already loved to start with. You can generate assessments by choosing where you want questions to come from (skills practice for Ch. 9 or assessment Ch. 2) or what kind or questions you want (short answer, multiple choice, etc) or you can even write your own questions. Or you can make your assessment a combination of any of these.

I used it just today to make a short quiz on Probability and in less than 5 minutes I had four different versions of the same quiz ready to go WITH keys.
Thank you Carnegie Learning for listening to the needs of your instructors!! You have made my year!! =)

A Very SLOW Week...

Wow – this week has been a SLOW week!! The first three days we did a CATS Scrimmage (a practice version of our state assessment) and then nearly all of my Algebra students were gone to the Jr. Beta Convention!! My classes were over half empty, but we didn’t waste any time…we practiced graphing lines given the slope and a point. I pulled up a piece of graph paper on my interactive whiteboard and I randomly chose a point and a slope and had the students come one at a time to the board. They got to draw their line with the stylus pen (which to them is so cool) and if they did it correctly, they got a piece of candy. (It’s amazing what students will do for a small piece of candy!) If they were incorrect, they always got another chance later on in class. They also got candy for raising their hand first if they noticed a mistake in someone else’s work. At first, I had intended on making the “come to the board by yourself” part voluntary, mainly for the sake of time. But to my surprise, every student (and I mean EVERY) wanted to get up in front of the others and try. I was amazed!!

We also used the student skills practice page for the Recycling and Saving problem (5.3). To be completely honest with you I had NO idea those skills practice pages were in the student assignment books at all until this year. They are a GREAT tool for extra practice or review!! So, by the end of this VERY SLOW week, when I should have felt overwhelmed and behind from all of the craziness, I felt a sense of satisfaction instead. My students got to “perform” for me one-by-one on the interactive whiteboard (every single one of them) and we got some extra practice in on a very important concept in mathematics. What more could I ask for? I am SOOOO ready for next week!!