Thanks to Kevin Olson of Blogstorm for the idea for this series. He asked if I had any strategies or systems for getting students to share ideas and critique each others work in response to my Patterns, Patterns Everywhere post for the #MTBoS challenge. This first post provides a bit of background about how I ended up in middle school and the beginning of my journey toward facilitator instead of teacher.
I will say that when I look out over my classroom, I sometimes think my students don't really need me. I step back and see groups of students discussing how they would approach a problem or explaining why the method they first tried didn't work. When it's time for class to end, I often have to run students out of the room because they want to keep working. I wonder how I got so lucky.
I know you will believe me when I say it didn't start out this way.
Having a K-6 degree with a math concentration, middle school was the last place I ever thought I would be. However, a series of unforseen events landed me right here...smack dab in the middle school of my super small K-8 charter school. A "promotion" from first grade of all places. This is my seventh year here and I can honestly say that after my leap of faith to the world of middle school I have never looked back.
That first year I started with a brand new textbook series with some great bells and whistles and that "old school" mentatlity of math teaching...I will show you how to do it, watch you do it a few times and then give you a bajillion problems to practice for homework. If you do your homework, you will be fine. If you don't, you won't understand the math. Tomorrow, we will move on to the next thing on the list. There will be a chapter test next week.
It didn't take me long to realize that it doesn't work that way.
Not to mention that I was literally killing myself trying to grade 60 papers every night. And that doesn't count the "extra" papers that I gave those fast finishers to do so they wouldn't be sitting around causing trouble.
It also didn't take me long to realize that teaching a class of 7th graders, for example, as a whole group doesn't work so well either. They are such goobers. They just can't help it. In spite of my low-tech everyone has a whiteboard and marker to show me your anwers technique, every day just left me feeling like a disaster. I couldn't keep the strugglers up to speed and keep the fast ones challenged and busy.
Drawing from my elementary background, I decided to give small groups and centers (or learning stations to make it sound more grown up) a try. Let's just say that this worked marginally well, at best. Great idea on paper, but as it turns out, you have to train kids to work independently. Who knew? While I felt that I was reaching more students, I still spent quite a bit of time barking at the "independent workers" trying to keep them on task.
So, once again reaching back to my elementary tool box, I decided to try weekly contracts. Now when I am working with a group, the other students have specific activities and tasks to choose from. Complete the contract each week and you will learn the math. Goof off and you'll end up in detention. The contracts even had the standards and "I Can" statements right on them! I thought I was so smart and that this would actually work.
You know, they just don't teach you what works and what doesn't work in college.
This post is getting rather long, so I will end by saying that at about this point I started to notice that my students were not persistent problem solvers. In fact, they didn't seem to really think much at all and would often take one look at a problem and decide they were never going to solve it. So they quit before they even began. This bothered me to no end and I started obsessing about how I could turn them into real problem solvers. Not just for math class, but for life.
As one who is always up for a challenge, I decided to take this one head on!
To be continued...
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