Written by Cohort 21 has been an incredible experience. I have had a supportive and innovative digital space to develop and explore my own professional learning goals and stay inspired. I cannot have asked for a better way to start my career.
Here is a link to my presentation which summarizes briefly the scope of my action plan, how my major in-class actions worked out, and my next steps.
In this post I will do my best to reflect back on my entire Cohort 21 experience and elaborate on the part of my process that didn’t translate well into presentation format: was my action plan successful?
My goals were to:
- Change students perception of what Math is and what it means to do Math;
- Have students develop a stronger understanding of the Algebra concepts we studied;
- Have students engage with more diverse and complex big mathematical ideas; and
- Teach students a relevant real world transferable skills (Coding).
My Successes (where I hit the mark):
The Coding tasks and computational explorations I had the students do throughout the year certainly allowed them to engage with more diverse and complex ideas. This was reflected in both their in class work and their submitted project reports (there are some great quotes in the slideshow above). In addition, I can proudly say 100% of our Grade 8 class knows the fundamentals of computer programming to at least some extent That’s 83 more females who know the power and value of computer science. I am confident in saying 3. and 4. were successful.
Taking an honest look at the first goal, I would say it was a partial success. My students understanding of what Math is and what it means to do Math certainly evolved in a healthy direction. They all engaged with the idea that the existence of computers fundamentally changes how humans approach problems and what strengths a successful Mathematician should have, but based on their written reports, some students still have yet to internalize that with respect to their own careers as mathematicians. Next time around, I want to change how I emphasize and connect these ideas in a new way.
My Challenges (realistic expectations):
Now the simplest question – where are the students Algebra skills when compared to other students who didn’t do the project? The feedback I got from my colleague (who teaches the same students science) aligned with what I observed later in the year. Their equation-solving and expression-simplifying skills are about the same. I still think the time spent in class on these tasks was well worth it given the successes listed above, but its important that I be realistic and honest about what the students really got out of the experience.
Expansion in My Thinking (off my radar):
One of the topics I came across during a great Webinar was the idea of “Computational Thinking”. It is an idea that has existed for a long time; we should be teaching students when the right time is to bring a computer in when solving a problem. This was a rephrasing of my focus but the teacher running the sessions implemented this using spread sheets. He spoke about how he has his students used simple spreadsheets to play with and explore numerical problems. He then used the students work as a basis to teach the concepts. Very cool stuff!
This helped me expand my thinking on ways students can be creative and explore numbers with technology. Although I started doing work like this in my current unit on statistics, this is what I want to look at moving forward. Specifically, I am hoping to implement “playing with numbers” on the computer as a major theme in the measurement/optimization unit next year. I am getting excited just thinking about it! It also go me thinking – what other technologies are out there? Robotics? 3D Printing? Lazer cutting?
Not a Goodbye:
I am very thankful for the Cohort 21 platform. I know I do my best work when I have people to collaborate with and be accountable too. Reading about everyone else’s progress always encourage me to do my best work and I can’t imagine what this year would have looked like without Cohort 21.
Knowing this about myself, I will do my best to keep up with my blog and twitter. It’s easy knowing that the current cohort will be right there with me.
No Relevant Images for this post – but as a thank you for reading it all the way to the end, here is my favourite Math comic.
One thing I definitely love about this action plan is that you seem to be learning in the same way your students are. The more opportunities, the more chance of people taking risks. The more risks, the more growth. And you used summary statistics for the feedback you got from your students. Well, now spreadsheets are being used for the exact same thing in the current unit!
So will this coding project be recycled next year with the off-the-radar expansion in your thinking, and robotics and 3D printing and lazer cutting?
Also…that math comic is cool. Do any of your students feel old or something? You should show that to them. It would be funny.
It’s my favourite comic because it shows students how silly it is to give up on Math. Middle and High School is meant to be a time to grow and make mistakes and one of the worst thing a student can do is pigeonhole themselves by saying “I’m not a Math person”. Regardless of age, you can be any person you want!
Thank you for the feedback – I did try to mimic the risk taking that I so often ask of my students and it was an exciting process.
My hope is to keep the Coding Project similar in scope and integrate robotics and lazer cutting into other units and create more interesting projects. Hopefully coding will be earlier in the year so they can build on those skills in later projects.
Wonderful successes! The graphs do show that most people thought the coding project was useful. My question is, why wouldn’t most of the students be likely to create their own codes in the future? Given that no project works for everyone, there were some outliers on the graphs, but the numbers seemed sort of scattered to me. All over the place. Could this mean that, while the usefulness of coding and algebra was apparent to them, they do not feel confident that they can use those skills?
Browsing through a few other action plans, I encountered various discussions surrounding the idea of grit alongside a growth mindset. Perhaps, as I have seen a few others do recently, telling your students about grit would help to embed a growth mindset and confidence into the project?
I look forward to seeing the results of this modified and improved project again soon!