Day 54: My first Stand and Talk!

Geometry
I did my first Stand and Talk today!  This was the material for the talk.  It occurred before we had talked about congruent polygons.  Students know about congruent angles and congruent segments, but not about congruent shapes.

I followed Sara VanDerWerf's Global Math Department talk about how to do Stand and Talks (also found in her blog post too).

Afterwards, we annotated the notes.  This is what the notes looked like.

Wins:

• When we moved to annotating the notes, it went really smoothly.  Students were certainly ready to hear it.
• Most students WERE talking about what they were supposed to.  
• It got people up and moving.  I was able to enforce the "no leaning" rule.

Opportunities:

• Most people were with people they were friends with - those groups were not necessarily talking about what they were supposed to be as much
• There were a lot of superficial noticing (the paper is white, the paper is heavy, etc)

Overall, I can see how this helps students to "See it before I show them and say it before I tell them".  That certainly happened in the class.

Moving forward, I am not sure what other lessons I can use these with.  At first glance, this is what I am thinking:

• Similar triangles
• Area (maybe a weird shape on a grid)
• Compound volumes/surface areas

I also think I can do this in CS...  I wonder if I can do new syntax for things like for-loops or nested conditionals(?).  I might even be able to do it for predicting code output(?) . I need to think about it a bit more.

AP CSP
Today we did Dan's set of practice problems on organizing code using functions and loops.  Honestly, both yesterday AND today could have each been two days.  I think there is value in both writing code themselves and reading others' code. Next year, I think I would do one set of problems at the END of unit 3 (before we do the project) and the other set to kick off unit 5.  I also think I would do a "code-along" of one of the problems to model how to think through these problems.

First hour I let them just go, and they didn't do a good job using functions.  The second hour we looked at the second problem and thought about where we saw functions that MIGHT exist.  Then students did a lot better.

I think also having students doing pair programming yesterday, helped them be successful today when they were working individually.

With that being said, I think we still need practice writing functions - I think I can incorporate that into our unit 5 lessons.

One Good Thing
I love getting to try new things, so that was a good thing today.

Day 54: Maybe Less IS more - AP CSA

Day 54 had a lot going on so I am splitting it into separate posts.  This one was for CSA.

I did a live lecture today that went really well.  Students watched a 7 minute video on the BASICS of arrays on CodeHS the night before and I threatened them with a quiz.  There was no quiz, but the threat was really effective!

Students came with some basic knowledge and then we did a basic problem together.  I had thought of the problem ahead of time, but did not do it myself.  I think that worked out really well actually because I very authentically thought out-loud with my students.  It was kind of like we were pair programming where I was one part of the pair and they were the other part.   I made a TON of mistakes and students caught them, or sometimes I would catch them but still let students puzzle through them.

Here was the task:

We started by having students describe what their strategy would be for solving this problem.  I outlined what they said on a white board.   During the hour, I would refer back to this original outline and either add to it or check-off what we had completed.  I wanted to model talking LESS about the actual code and MORE about the thinking.  I see my students who struggle most want to talk about the "for loop" or what ever coding construct right away in a problem.  My more successful students talk strategy rather than syntax.  It might just be because they are more comfortable with syntax so they don't need validation on syntax where as my struggling students do need that validation, but I still think it is important to come up with a strategy before getting too far in the weeds.

At the end of the hour I gave students time to fill out a reflection.  I know that I model best programming practices when we do these "code-alongs" but it occurred to me that students might not know that.  NAMING those practices in written form I think helped call that out.  According to this survey, many students were able to recognize it after the fact too.

I also asked them some straight-forward questions like:

• What is one thing you learned today?
• What is one question you still have after today?
• What are you planning on doing to get these questions resolved after today?

Their answers were pretty straight-forward, but again, it was a nice way to put a bow on the day and ensure that students could name what they learned.

We didn't finish the task, but I am going to QUICKLY finish it tomorrow at the start of class without so much interaction from the class.