Today was a really fun day, I was able to try out my first round of woodworking in the maker space during Wellness Wednesday. The goal was to have students build a small box out of popsicle sticks and balsa wood. Within that task, they would learn to use proper measuring techniques, how to use Exacto knives properly as well as how to use wood glue and even small clamps if necessary.

While designing this activity I was constantly mulling over the level of detail and instruction I should give. Generally, when doing most hands-on STEM things, I try to present as bare a scaffold as possible so that students can take a general idea and run with it as far or as deeply as they would like.

When I thought about this more deeply I realized that the more instruction I provide, the less room there is for students to be creative and there would be more opportunity for students to focus on making mistakes instead of the final product. I don’t want students focusing on my approval at each step, I want them focusing on the task at hand and actively trying something.

My How Might We question this year is “How might we design meaningful situations where students can safely learn to fail?” In a culture that so intensely presents a need for success and excellence, how can students learn to fail or move forward after making mistakes? Failure is a learned skill and vital not just for academic success, but also for mental health and life in general.

In a maker space, mistakes and failure are a vital part of the building and design process. Many of my students coming into my room have never really built anything with their hands. All of this is new for them and I am so excited to see them try things, break them and build them back again.

What I’m left with now however is the same thoughts I had as I planned out this activity. How much instruction is the right amount to promote a healthy level of mistakes? @sreimer asked me some great questions about how to avoid the “is this correct?” question from her students and I am wondering that as well. I think my direction now will be turning towards the amount and detail in my instructions and how that can possibly lead towards a bit more creativity and room for safe mistakes in the classroom, maybe even failing at tasks without panic. However my mind still feels like the graphic @lmcbeth posted and I wouldn’t be surprised if these thoughts led me in a whole other direction. I’m also interested in hearing about what other Cohort 21 members think. How do you balance the level of detail in your instruction? Does any of this ever cross your mind?

I hope everyone has been having a good start to the year, it’s been a complete whirlwind for me but I wanted to take some time to reflect on some great successes I’ve had so far this year as well as commit to my goals for the future.

This year I was so happy to take on a new leadership role as the Middle School Tech Lead. With it came some new responsibilities such as planning out Wellness Wednesday activities for our Middle School maker space.

This year I wanted to try something new and put myself out there. One of my goals in the past was to learn more about 3D printing and how I can incorporate it more into our curriculum. Not only that but how can I present it to my colleagues without overwhelming them? To that end I decided to start small by using the software Tinkercad and having the students and teachers learn how to make their own name tags or key chains. Here’s an example of the first one I made!

I can’t begin to express how much fun I and the students are now having on Wednesday afternoons when they began to learn the software and create their own designs. The software is so user friendly and fun. I’m debating on making a post on how to use it if anyone is interested please let me know and I will make one! It ended up being a really approachable activity that (fingers crossed) the students enjoyed and will hopefully incorporate more into their own PBL projects in all other subjects.

There is another reason I was so thrilled with how this activity went, and it has to do with my personal goal this year that I want to focus on.

I want to create more opportunities for students to really try things, mess up and learn from their mistakes. My first year at Cohort 21 my goal was to learn more about how to make Middle School students more comfortable with trying things and making mistakes in math. But as I continued my research I realized that I wanted to go deeper. I firmly believe that we need to make more opportunities for students to really fail at something and learn how to deal with that failure. Failing at things is a learned skill, nots something kids know how to do inherently. A maker space is a perfect place for that to start. It’s a space where you build things, break them and build them again. The stakes are low but the learning opportunities are high.

This year I would like to develop more curriculum that centres around failing and moving forward with that failure. With the concept of learning how to fail and how to get back up again. I often wonder about how much we tend to protect our students in an independent school setting from failing and how that might correlate with anxiety and strong levels of perfectionism that I see among our students as they get older. I believe this goal is not only pedagogical but cultural and I will no doubt hit some bumps along the way, but I want to firmly point myself in this direction and try to take a step forward this year.

So, #sharpsweetandsalty here is my post and my first step. I am so excited to see what everyone else puts forward and to encourage you every step of the way!

This was an absolute week of small and big victories in my math class. To start we are going through an Integers unit and as always certain parts of the concepts completely flummox some of my students . To that end I have a silly dance to help my students remember integer rules. After we had explored and discussed the concepts I showed my students the dance. In the past this has always been something funny but since this is now the age of TikTok my students pounced on it and asked if I would make one for the math dance. I told them I don’t have an account but they were welcome to. Instead I made a silly dance video and posted it to my twitter account @MsGScience2.  If you want to see it it’s on my twitter feed and I have to preface by saying I am not a good dancer.

From there, the energy in math class continued. This week we had a guest from the CEMC come in to visit and because of that my 7’s had to move to a different classroom. From some sheer act of luck we were moved to the exact classroom I was able to watch a grade 12 math lesson in that I had reflected on previously. It is chocked full of whiteboards and ‘good math energy’. I walked in to the class and looked around and thought, ‘I can’t waste this opportunity to shake things up’. To that in when my students walked in I informed them we were going to do a surprise thinking task.

I have been keeping my students informed of the professional development I have been working on and told them that this was going to be a fun trial run on what we have been working on as a class. To that end I put up our math response rubric and we looked over it one more time as a class. We discussed if we felt anything should be changed or if our idea of excellence had changed at all. The girls all felt pretty comfortable with the concepts and how they would be assessed. I then paired them up and spread them out throughout the space and presented them with our open ended question.

The girls then dove into the question and used the space to the best of it’s ability

While they were doing this I was able to circulate, discuss and take notes on their observations. I noticed that the girls were thoroughly enjoying themselves and even go to witness a few of these moments.

Math Dance

Afterwards, I sent out an anonymous survey to the students. I hadn’t planned on doing the thinking task with the students yet, but one of the next steps was to send out a survey to see what I could change or do differently next time. The survey would help me see if my students were seeing the results I was and if I was really on the right track for my How Might We question. I told the students that this was an anonymous exit ticket and that any feedback would be useful to me. Since I am focusing on increasing risk-taking and student buy in in my class, my questions had to do with things we did in that specific class as well as how they felt about the assessment itself and the risks they had to take to answer open-ended questions. The first answer about their comfort made me laugh right out loud.

Most forgot they were even being assessed at all.

From there I asked them if they felt more comfortable with the risks they took to find answers during this assessment and the answers got me so excited..

I couldn’t have asked for better progress and I was thrilled to see this and their reflection.

I then asked them to consider the changes we made to the lesson and how they felt about several things; from the rubric to the way we used the room to go through and explore these questions. Overall the students seemed to really appreciate how we

use the rubric, and that they were given the opportunity to discuss and problem solve together in an open and engaging way.

To sum up this week ended with me seeing some real tangible results and progress towards my HMW question, and I was able to see real growth not only in myself as a teacher but also in the mindset of my students and their overall engagement in my math class. I am so excited to take this to another level. I think my next goal should be as mentioned before, to see how I can take this beyond my assessments and to my lessons as a whole. Each day I feel that I am teaching more and more authentically and bringing more to my students. I can’t wait to see where I end up next.

So a lot has been going on my mind since our last F2F on Friday and have really been thinking about how much I am doing towards my research question and if I am doing enough. This thought was going through my head while looking at the piles of marking I had on my desk and how I found I wasn’t having enough time to one on one conference witrh my students about their assignments. You can say that my next move was a slight act of neccesity, mild-panic and desperation but with some forethought I promise! The results made me really happy and I could see that all the work I was doing was making a difference to my students and their mindset about their math abilities. And my coaches will be pleased to hear, on the car ride home all I could think was ‘I can’t wait to blog about this.’

Basically, today in math class I had both a science and math assignment I wanted to hand back my students and conference about. I announced to the students that this time I would not be calling them up once at a time to show them their work and essentially stare at them while they look over their work, waiting silently while my nervous students reflect and decide how they performed.

Instead, I told my students I was going to hand their work and rubric to them and that I wanted them to take the time to look over my feedback and the rubric. I told them I didn’t want to see them until they were confident they could discuss how they thought they did on the assignment and the grade they deserved. Here is what happened.

After about 5 minutes I had students lining up at my desk, what used to be 5 minute conversations turned into 1-2 minute conversations where my students could proudly and assertively say, ‘I am here and worked really hard on this‘, or ‘I could have done better on this so I think I’m here.‘ I felt that this conferencing was much more effective and in less than half the time.

Looking back on it this feels like a ‘well duh’ situation. My students were given time to reflect at their own pace and not looking to me for hints. They approached me with more confidence and were able to give more reasoning as to why they believed they succeded or where they need to improve. I felt less flustered and was able to enjoy the conversation.

Afterwards I polled the class and asked how they were feeling. I have kept them in the loop on my professional development and they know this is one area I want to work on with them. Compared to our first single-point rubric and math discussion my students said they felt much more confident and aware of what they were doing. There were less questions about ‘What was my percentage? Did I get the answer correct?’ and more ‘I could have expanded on this more to show my thinking’.

To add to this contrast, I have had two new students since December and a lot of this was entirely new to them. Their contrast really demonstrated to me the growth I’ve seen in my students. I wanted to create a class where students are more confortable taking risks in math and have bought in to the whole learning process. With my new students they had never been asked to reflect on their math responses before. It was entirely new to them.

One student even pointed out, “At my old school they just cared if you got the right answer”. I then asked her “What if you got the right answer but don’t know why?” she replied with ‘That never mattered’.

Basically this to me feels like I’m on the right track and that I can absolutely go deeper. I think this means considering more ways to increase student risk in math that might be outside of assessment. I think I can work more now on discussion prompts or how to incorporate more PBL and open-ended tasks in my day-to-day teaching. A 5 minute conversation with @SirMrMoore on my new unit sparked multiple ideas. I’m excited to see where it will take me.