Warm-up Follow-up

We’re in week 2 of doing daily warm-ups like I mentioned in my last post. One class had 4 days of them last week, and the other four classes had 3 (we spent one day going over the exam and one day reviewing what we’d been doing just before the break). What I told the kids is that my New Year’s resolution is to give them better and more frequent feedback, so that they don’t end up surprised on the quiz when they don’t know something as well as they thought. I also told them that I want them to improve their ability to self-assess, and the way to do that is by practicing it.

Here’s an example of what they look like, the final version (split into two images – they just have blank space in the middle to work the problem):

I have it set up so that I’ve got a Word document mail-merging an Excel file where I enter the variable information. (I <3 mail merge.) The only problem I have so far is that I can't enter both text and an equation into the same cell in Excel, so I sometimes have to write an equation on the worksheet before making copies. The same thing would apply if I wanted to add a figure. But that's not a huge deal.

I feel like it's working well. I've been able to get the papers marked from the previous day with no problem (I know that's just an issue of discipline, but marking papers quickly is something I have struggled with in the past). I am seeing where the kids are making errors and addressing them sooner rather than later. I get to see how well they feel like they're doing, and they've naturally started adding comments by the faces to explain why they're confused or don't feel completely confident with something. That is GREAT, because they are thinking about their thinking, which is a skill they need to continue practicing.

Today's warm-up says this:

We’ve been doing these warm-ups for a few days now. Do you feel like they are helping you understand the concepts more clearly? Why or why not?

Their feedback is almost entirely positive, and they’ve made some thoughtful comments that are helping me consider how I can improve things. If you’d like to see their responses, I’ve typed them up here (yes, I have small classes, though I was missing 3 kids in 1st period).

Going over homework?

How do you review homework with your classes? Right now I’m just having the students ask questions and then we go through solving the problems they were unsure of. (Sometimes I do it, sometimes I have another student do it, sometimes I have the student who asked do it so we can figure out where they made a mistake.)

But it feels like that takes up waaaay too much class time, and I’m running out of time for teaching whatever new material I’d planned on. So…how do you do it?