File Transfer Incomplete

This has been a year of reflection. Actually, every year is a year of reflection, but this year is different. In fact, I have reflected so much that at one point (and maybe still), I felt as though I was (am) having a bit of a teacher identity crisis. You know, like that friend who hits 40 and suddenly she cuts her hair, starts working out everyday, and quits eating carbs? Yeah, you know who you are. My identity crisis has come from not knowing who I am or what I am as a blended learning teacher; I do not know how I fit into this new teaching world. I know exactly who I am in the face to face classroom, but I cannot seem to translate that into blended learning. My colleagues and I keep going back to the analogy of being a student teacher or a first year teacher. As a first year teacher, you had an ok idea of who you were as a teacher - what your teaching style/philosophy was. You were a risk-taker because you were young and unafraid of taking risks, and most importantly you had an older and wiser veteran teacher there to keep you in line and offer guidance. This veteran teacher didn’t have to have the same philosophy, mine didn’t, but he knew what good teaching looked like based on how the kids responded. In our case, there is no older, wiser veteran teacher to keep us in line. We are rookies, but other teachers and administrators tell us we are brave and amazing and brilliant... what about our students? This past week almost 40% of my enrollment dropped; I have lost more students this week than in the previous 10 years combined teaching my face-to-face courses. Those around me have been supportive by making up every excuse possible, that doesn’t involve me being the problem, to try and make it seem like this is ok. The fact is, I have failed to translate myself digitally. “File install failed. Parts of the program may not function properly”; we have all seen this error message and now I am living it.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So now this weekend, looking at my reduced student roster, I am trying to find a way to fix this. I need to experience some sort of success so I can look at myself in the mirror again and not feel as though every student I walk by in the hallway is thinking, “There’s that shitty teacher who teaches that horrible online math class.” I need help from an older and wiser veteran who knows what the heck he/she is talking about to give me advice and guidance. Criticism does not hurt me; no, please do not be afraid.  I have 15 weeks of student journals full of information about everything I did wrong, so a faceless person offering criticism will not hurt me a bit.

Here is who I know I am as a face-to-face teacher. I teach students to learn how to think, how to learn. I do this through discovery and inquiry - when I learned about the constructivist philosophy as an undergrad, I salivated at the mouth. After my students have explored, questioned, and  have developed a good idea about the topic being learned, I follow it with the formal presentation of the concept and theory. Then we learn together by doing problems - the students practice basic skills at home and solve rich problems in small groups. I have flipped my classes intermittently to allow for more of the rich problem solving to be done in class. My favorite time of year is actually right now when my AP Calculus students are finally over the “I can’t answer your questions out loud, because I risk being wrong;” instead, they come to class and offer strong, firm feedback to each other.  They have learned to not give each other the answers; they guide each other through the thought process of finding the answers, and in special cases, they encourage each other to find the best way to the answer or even extend that idea to a bigger one. I literally had tears in my eyes this past Thursday when I heard a quiet, “never outwardly participate in the thinking process” student say to another student, “Yes! That’s right and why did you decide to do that? What is ‘y’? Ok then, plug it in! What do you see?” At the end of the year, my kids are successful - nearly 90% of my students earn a 4 or 5 on the AP exam.  Part of this is because they are good kids trained by highly qualified and amazing teachers before me, and part of it is because I think I do an ok job.

So why do I not translate digitally? Maybe the better question is, why would I want to? How can I do what I do better, or at least as good, in our chosen rotational blended model? 40% of my students have spoken. Yes, I know there are many reasons that students might drop a 5th level honors math course (especially if they had not taken an honors math course previously), but at the end of the day I did not deliver; I did not engage them. I did not teach them to think and I did not teach them how to learn in their digital space . So what does it take to be a good teacher in a blended environment? Tech savvy? (check) Successful in the face-to-face environment? (check) A risk taker? (check) Open to change and experimentation? (check) How about this list:  25 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers (from the blog TeachThought)? (check).

I had big ideas for this course and what I wanted it to be; my students and I were going to explore the unexplored together, but it is just not working for me. Maybe all highly effective, tech savvy teachers just do not translate to the blended learning environment to be effective blended learning environment teachers...file transfer incomplete.

Christina Hamman (@hammanmath on Twitter)
Mathematics Teacher

This Is Not Your Parents' Statistics Course!

How can we use math to determine whether or not a company wrongfully laid off its workers simply because they were older than others? Where does polling data come from, and can it be trusted? Do the students of MHS feel that there are cliques and are they part of one? What are the style preferences of MHS females? Do private lessons really give you an edge in competing for "chairs" in orchestra? Can people really tell the difference between a name brand coffee versus a store brand; does the name brand really taste better? What keeps MHS students up at night, and does the answer differ by age or gender? These are just a few of the questions my Advanced Quantitative Analysis and Mathematical Modeling (AQAM) students have been investigating this year.

Yes, this year I was one of the "chosen”, a never-give-up-self-punishing-perfectionist who was asked if I would be part of the blended learning pilot program for Medina High School. And I, never afraid of a challenge, said "ok, but I would like to create a course from scratch". As you can see from the title of this course, my mantra was go big or go home. And so here I am, at the end of the first grading period, in the middle of what you could call a perfect storm of mathematics educational technology delight...or dread. I took this unique opportunity to try, without real penalty, to teach a version of a course that I have been envisioning for the last decade of teaching. A course that ALL students would find something to take away for the future; a course that would not require (or allow) a mathematics cookbook in which to solve problems; a course that would be relevant for 21st century learning and a small step toward what I believe is what is meant by educational reform.

I have learned a great deal in a very short amount of time and since I have had zero time to really sit and put my thoughts down on paper, I realize that I could write more than any one person would stand to read in one sitting. Some of what I have to say will make you laugh, some will make you scream, some will make you take pity on myself and my fellow blended learning cohorts - but mostly I hope that some of what I have to say will inspire you and save you from making some of the mistakes I have made. For now, I will just introduce you to the course that I am creating and tell you about the basic structure and how it is different from the other courses I have taught.

Student Demographics:

Students are taking this course as a 5th year course after successfully completing Precalculus. They may choose to take this instead of OR in addition to a Calculus course. This year, the majority of my students are hoping to pursue careers in a health-related, business, or engineering field. When you read this, you might be thinking, “Wow, you have a dream job with dreamy students!”; don’t forget, while I do have fabulous and bright students, they have all been taught traditionally for 12 years and change is tough!

Content:

My initial plan for content was one semester of Elementary Statistics and one semester of selected Finite Math topics, all under the idea that we can use math to model a variety of situations in the world of healthcare, business, finance, and science. At this point, I will be happy to get through the Statistics portion. Fair enough, I am trying to teach for depth through problem solving and collaborative projects and that takes time; the inner math geek feels disappointed though.

Course Structure:

Each week, I post a lesson for students through Blackboard. This lesson contains readings and supplemental videos.  These videos are short, meant to supplement the reading; watching only the video would be tragic on the student’s part. Built within each lesson are concept checks through short multiple-choice quizzes, hotspot activities, matching, sorting, etc. These purely check for basic understanding of what they are reading; and to keep them honest. Students work through the lesson, at their preferred pace, for the week. In class, we problem solve and work with datasets using Minitab. I teach them how to do all computations by hand with small “irrelevant” datasets and then I show them how to ask Minitab to do the same thing with real data (our first dataset contained 1450 observations). Students are assigned something additional to practice each week: group discussion questions, group problems to solve, group/individual lab assignments, and always a end of week private journal entry.

Assessment:

The main form of assessment is team projects. Instead of a unit test, they design and carry out a project (with guidelines of what to demonstrate mastery with), they write a formal paper, and they give a brief presentation to the class. The majority of students have said that they enjoy the projects since they get to pick the topic/research question. Through these projects, they are learning the additional skills of collaboration (either face-to-face or via technology), public speaking, writing, professionalism, and how to use digital tools effectively. Team projects come with their own set of challenges; the biggie is equal division of labor. This part will be a work in progress for me, in the mean time I still give an end of quarter traditional exam. The exam has things like computations, reading computer output and writing interpretations in context, and case scenarios that they analyze or answer questions about.

In future posts I will write about the challenges that I have faced in implementing this model. I consider myself tech-savvy – but I have still had trouble in implementation. I have a solid record of students reaching high-achievement on high-stake assessments, but teaching in any online environment is very different from the face-to-face environment and so I struggle to feel confident that my students are achieving the same level of success I have come to expect. In a face-to-face math course, you typically deliver a lesson with whatever method you feel most effective and then you send students home for 30-45 minutes of drill-and-kill problems; but do they really learn? Do they develop conceptual understanding? Do they understand not only how to get the right answer, but how to get the best and most efficient answer? I say no, not always. My course focus is conceptual understanding and finding the best answers to real problems, and some students (and parents) want a textbook and drills, and points; if they understand it, well that is a bonus. All of our courses represent change, and as the previous post "Transition" by Shannon Conley discussed, transition and change take time.

(Christina Hamman can be followed on Twitter: @hammanmath)