School’s been out for over 3 weeks now, and I’m starting to feel like thinking about it again. :) So I’m ready to post now.
Next year will be different for me. Two of my classes will be middle school courses, which will be new to me, and one of the high school courses will change from trig/analyt to precalculus, so not new material exactly but a different emphasis and course layout. Geometry and calculus will remain in my schedule (with a new text for geometry), and statistics will not.
Also, I’m expecting baby #2 in late December or early January, so I’ll basically be taking the 3rd quarter off. That means preparing for a long-term sub. I’m a bit worried about the SBG aspect of things there.
Speaking of SBG, here are some thoughts I’ve had relating to assessment…
- I need to get better about spiraling feedback for all students on all topics. I ended up with a “keep trying until you get it right, but then it’s okay to forget it” attitude among my students, and that’s not my goal.
- I’m going to be using ActiveGrade this year, which I think will be great for my students. My school is going to online grade reporting as well (I know, we’re waaaay behind the times there!), but I think I can reasonably just keep the ActiveGrade updated and then enter scores in the official gradebook when I need to for report cards. ActiveGrade will give the kids (and their parents!) access to so much more information about their scores than a traditional gradebook.
- A big problem I had last year was that as midterms or end-of-quarter approached, I would have large numbers of students in my classroom wanting to reassess. The rest of the time, not so much. It was a last-minute effort for most of the kids. (There were exceptions, naturally – this is just the general pattern.) I would also have kids who would say, “I want to reassess these three learning targets tomorrow. Can you tell me what they were over?” It was really, really painful to hear that, because it showed me clearly that it was still all about the grades. The kids were looking at their scores, finding the ones that were the lowest, and not even going back to their marked-up work to figure out what those were about, just asking me to tell them. Then they’d come in and, surprise!, not do well on the reassessment. Lather, rinse, repeat. I am working on how to remedy this, though I do think the previous two bullet points will help, but I also need to implement a better process for allowing reassessments, along the lines of Sam’s form email.
- In the fourth quarter, I stopped keeping track of student homework completion. This was not a good idea. While I still think homework should not factor into the students’ grades, I also think that knowing they have to report what they’ve done is good accountability. And I think I need to start taking up homework for feedback purposes at least some of the time.
- My students need to get better at knowing how to help themselves understand concepts. With some of them, I don’t know if they never bother to read my comments, or if they read them and think “okay, I’ve got it now” when they really don’t, or if they read them and think “I still have no clue what she’s talking about, or what to do from here.” I need to help them learn how to evaluate their own understanding better.
Other thoughts, not related to SBG…
- I started out last year with some great, fun activities for the students, plenty of active uses of the mathematics they were learning. Then I got bogged down and into a rut of mostly class discussions. I want to get back to the way I started out. Discussions are great things, but not when they’re the only thing happening.
- I want to continue working on incorporating the history of mathematics into my teaching.
- I had a “math fair” as part of my students’ final exam grades for the second semester last year. I believe it was a worthwhile endeavor, and I plan to do it again, though it will not be part of the exam grade in the future. However, with my maternity leave planned for the 3rd quarter this year, I’m not sure if it’s something that can happen, as I don’t want to place any part of that burden on a sub. So it may be 2012-2013 before I do it again.
Seems like I had more things rolling around in my head than that, but some of them must have escaped. ;) Anyway, those are things I’m thinking about with regard to next year. Hopefully, I’ll be back with further thoughts on how I plan to improve as the summer goes on.
Praxis of Reflection 