Curriculum Materials and Resources

My schools math department really plays by it's own rules in a sense because we are a charter school. We don't really do anything along with the other public schools in our area. We are the alternative to the traditional public school. RPA is the Redmond Proficiency Academy is proficiency based so the students are required to meet the standards that all other students in the public schools are supposed to meet, but it is required for all of our students to meet each individual standard instead of having to pass a class where all of the standards are lumped in to one grade.

There are only two math teachers at RPA and RPA uses moodles in all of their classes which are basically class websites that can be accessed by students and teachers. Both teachers have all of their lessons, powerpoints, homeworks, and extra practice assignments on their websites. The teacher that I work closest with records all of his lectures and posts them online as well so that students have no excuse to not know what is going on. He also has Khan Academy pages set up for each lesson which students use often. We use a program called WizIQ to record the lectures and it shows what we write, say, and video of the classroom. Every student can access any lecture or anything they may need for class to stay on track. It is great because parents can access their child's grades and see where they need to be in class. It helps them to get involved and keep their child on track if their child struggles to do so on their own. This is especially true for younger high school students.

I have started a Facebook and a Twitter for my classes which one of the math teachers does as well. Students don't use it much, but especially the Facebook page you can use to send out updates on what is coming up in class, etc. so students will receive a live update of anything you want them to know assuming they check their Facebook often, which most of them seem to do every five minutes. My Twitter account for class is mostly for following other math related Twitter accounts. They are mostly too advanced for high school students, but I post things every once in a while that are pertinent to class and what we are working on.

Routine-Intro to New Topic

The topic that I taught was on completing the square. We have not worked on this yet, but had worked on converting previous forms of quadratic equations over the past few days. I figured that this was so different that it counted as a new topic. The video is just a recording off of the smart board. It was either see what I was writing or see the class, so I figured the writing was more important so you can make sense of it. I could only get it on youtube and not vimeo because my teacher has them all converted to youtube for her classes. I apologize if it is too long. It is a whole lesson. I needed the whole thing to send to a student who was out with a relative who passed.

My strengths were having students involved in the lesson rather than just lecturing them. I try to have them lead me through the lesson by asking leading questions. I observed student learning by asking a lot of questions to see how they were understanding. I also had about a half hour of students working on problems while I walked around observing so I could see how they were doing. I also checked for understanding by asking them to rate their understanding 1-3, 3 being the highest. There were only about five different students who were answering/asking questions. This is a very small class, only about 12 students. Even though you can't see the students, there are only probably two students that aren't engaged. That is easy to fall in to because this is my last class of the day so students are tired which makes it challenging. Addressing varied abilities did not come up much because most of the students are on the same page. The students who did not understand spoke up when needed and that was about as far as it went. My role in supporting learning was having students guide me through the lesson. One challenge I observed was getting students to participate early on. Since this is a small class late in the day it is pretty difficult at times to get this group to participate. I would probably revise this lesson by having students work on problems on their own more in the middle of the lesson so that they are getting a chance to try and can figure out whether they really understand what we are doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYwi2_lF-cU&feature=youtu.be

Summary of Quadratics Pre-Test

Most of my students (Willamette cohorts) still need to learn the quadratic equation which is a huge part of this unit. I will need to find a song or a rhyme for them to make it easier to remember. Students did well solving equations, so that made me feel that I am focusing more on the work and not enough on the importance of it and why they need to know it. Most students at this level know how to solve equations, so it is important that I focus on why quadratics are different and what they need to be looking out for.

Overall I was pleased with the results of the pre-test. I gave my pre-test to my actual students yesterday and they did very poorly (which I expected). Most of them got the true/false and multiple choice questions and missed everything else. I think one person got any question right outside of those and I have tested about 20 students so far. Since most students haven't learned about quadratics before I will be teaching a new concept so it will be fun to see how well everyone does. I have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks as I go teach my work sample.

Here is a link to my results from my cohorts. I had my students in class take it as a paper test.

Video of Teaching Warm-Ups

Here is a link to my warm up video. I couldn't figure out how to email it to you all. The quality is pretty good but I am using a new program so I did not know this was the way it would turn out. You can't see much. Sorry. It picks up a few minutes in, but you don't miss much. My teacher is putting the screen together so that is why it starts out with a computer desktop screen. We are reviewing scientific notation that we learned in the last class. I think that the biggest strengths in my teaching of warm ups were that I made students explain everything and answer the questions so that it wasn't just me talking the whole time and explaining. I got a good sense of how much information they retained. The evidence of student learning was in the responses. I don't think there was a lot of activity and engagement, so I think it seemed like there was less than there really is. I don't think many of the students were engaged, you couldn't see but there were about 20 students in the class and it sounded like there were four. I am really struggling at this school because students are not very active in class. They mostly expect to be taught and not respond. My role in supporting learning was to help lead students to the right answer when they were struggling to find the answer. One challenge that I observed was that there was a lot of wasted time waiting for students to answer and respond. I need to find a way to be more engaging to students who are not used to being active in class. Most of the other teachers just lecture the whole class while everyone is quiet. The typical mistakes students made were mostly due to focus. Students tended to guess on a lot of answers instead of thinking. I could tell they were reluctant to answer due to lack of confidence and that many of the students are shy. I would revise this routine by maybe starting out with something fun or just me having more energy in general. Engaging the students early and setting the tone for the whole class would help improve the warm-ups and the entire class.

Algebra 2 Quadratics Pre-Test

Here is a link to my pre-test. I will try to get it on here, but click the link just in case. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated because this is the one I plan on using for my class. If it sends you to the spreadsheet, just click on forms and "go to live form" and it should appear in the way where you could take the test.

Jeremy-Teaching

This video is of me teaching sixth graders about decimals to the 10ths and 100ths place. We just finished a unit on fractions. It went okay. We had a little confusion with a few students that I had to help individually later on, but most of the kids got it pretty well. Recording the video was easy, I just had my teacher push record and I have a Flip camera, so it was easy. It added a little bit of extra pressure, so I wasn't as comfortable as usual. The whole Vimeo process was easy, but I had a lot of trouble with the Flip software. I have used it before, but never to put online so I got a little lost and confused. The only problems I had were strictly based on my inexperience with the Flip software. Here is my video. Enjoy.

Untitled from Jeremiah Milliron on Vimeo.

Interview Q & A's

I interviewed my practicum teacher Brian Miller. He has been teaching for about fifteen years and his teaching philosophy is very inquiry based. He feels that students would rather learn through doing than by listening to him lecture all day and he has had a lot of success with this. His classes have far above average test scores compared to the rest of the school. Here is what he had to say about these questions. 1. How does the CMP curriculum align with the national Common Core and NCTM standards? The NCTM aligns pretty much exactly with the state standards because they come from the NCTM standards. They use the CMP textbooks and those cover all of the state standards (but they have to skip around to different grade level books sometimes to cover all of the state benchmarks), so he believes that they all align pretty closely 2. Numerous students are a year or more behind in the basics. How does one address the needs of these students on a daily basis so they can get up to grade level and also experience success in the inquiry to investigation philosophy of the CMP? Math lab is a class that is available to students who are struggling and it is offered in place of a normally required music class. Math lab is taken along with the standard 6th, 7th, or 8th grade math class and they focus on the aspects of math that these students are struggling with and going over concepts learned that day or in previous days of class. Students in math lab are recommended by teachers from the previous year or students who are not meeting the standards on the OAKS tests are usually required to take it. The school also offers before and after school tutorial that is available to all students. It takes place three mornings and three afternoons a week. 3. What is the role of homework (and accountability) in the CMP? The role of homework in the CMP is to make sure that students can do problems that we have done in class on their own. They also do extension problems that are basically extra credit, so it also shows you which students are willing to put in extra work. Students are rarely given time to work on homework in class, so it really does show you what students can do on their own (assuming they aren't working on it with friends or copying). 4. CMP Investigations compose of small-groups (pair-share, teamwork, cooperative learning).Describe several classroom management techniques that ensure all students are actively engaged. Eg, how are individual roles established? Accountability (Group, individual)? Ongoing assessment(s) and checking for understanding? Mr. Miller keeps students actively engaged in class by being energetic and funny. His students love him and they feed off his energy. He also is constantly walking around the classroom and checking on students to make sure they are staying on task and understanding everything. Students ask him and their peers for help when they are working on assignment and he feels that letting students work together is a good way to keep them having fun because they are interacting and not getting bored. He also offers a lot of one on one help for students who seem to be off task or copying answers and not doing the work. It lets those students know that he is watching them and he is usually able to stop those things before they become a problem.