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Tuesday, June 24, 2014

AVID Summer Institute - Day 2

Day 2 at AVID SI started in our strands at 8am, then after lunch we worked with our site teams. I felt that today was a very productive day overall and I'm very pleased with our progress.

Here are my take-aways from today:

  • We started the day briefly discussing Cornell Notes, which is a staple of the AVID program. One of the ideas that was shared was regarding the Curve of Forgetting and how C-Notes can help with retention of material. One of the presenters uses a C-notes review as a warmup activity and asks her students to get out their C-Notes from yesterday's lesson/lecture and with an elbow partner, review/revise their notes. This would also be a good time to work on left-column or summarization.

  • Whenever we have done a quickwrite, one of the presenters always ends the last 10 seconds with "You have 10 seconds left.. finish your last though.. finish your last sentence.. finish your last word... and stop"

  • We did a Philosophical Chairs activity today, so I tweeted out asking for ideas on using them in math. I haven't had much response yet.. :(

  • Marking the text in math - I think I want to get into the habit of "circling key terms and underlining claims". In my class, that would be "circling key information" as in the important details of the problem and "underlining the question being asked". I am hoping that if I get my students in the habit of doing this, it will help them tackle new problems and gather the important information.

  • Modeling is KEY! I realized today that math teachers do a good job in general of modeling our internal dialogue that occurs when we tackle a new problem. However, in our strand, some of the strategies were used with the thought that we already knew what was going on. I understand that teaching children is different than teaching degreed adults, but modeling your expectations is important no matter what the age of your students.

  • We ended the day talking about summarizing strategies. I don't know how to use that yet, but one idea I had was to have some sort of gallery walk to illustrate different summary sentences of the same paragraph. When we were writing a one sentence summary for a paragraph of test, I was very anxious about whether I did it right. I know there wasn't a right answer, so I think seeing other sample student responses would have helped me to relax a bit.

  • One of the ideas for teaching summary skills reminded me of an idea from Embedded Formative Assessment. The presenter mentioned giving several samples of summaries and having students rank them by quality. I don't know if I like this idea or not since it can be very subjective...

    Tomorrow is Day 3, then home we go! :) Have a great day!
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    3 comments:

    1. Mr. HJune 25, 2014 at 12:55 AM

      Philosophical Chairs doesn't seem to work as well in math as it does in other subjects. (Disclaimer: I have limited training and experience using Philosophical Chairs)

      The activity works well when the topic is debatable where students can take differing positions that are just as valid and engage in the activity by restating/summarizing someone else's position while also presenting their own. Hard to see how it would work with "Is x=1 the solution to 3x+2=5?" or "Should the quadratic formula be used to solve all quadratic equations?" May be someone more creative can come up with better questions for this activity.

      I tried to adapt Philosophical Chairs to make it work with the Monty Hall problem here: http://mrhodotnet.blogspot.com/2013/06/monty-hall-problem-through.html. Since the problem is counter-intuitive, there's bound to be some differing positions that students will take. Students took turns convincing each other why they are correct. There's still only one correct solution, but the discussion is what's valuable with the activity.

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    2. SherrieJune 25, 2014 at 8:15 AM

      Thanks for a great post. We used the text marking strategy in my 7th grade class this year and it realy made a difference with students when working on assign and assessments. When they marked the text they were far less likely to answer the wrong question! Students felt it helped them focus on what information was necessary to solve the problem.

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    3. pamjwilsonJune 26, 2014 at 5:55 AM

      Again. Good stuff. What about instead of ranking the summary...2 stars and a wish. What are 2 things they like or see as a strength and one suggestion for improvement? They would still be thinking critically, seeing other samples. Possibly revisit their own and revise based on what they saw/read and feedback from others???

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