Musings from Mrs. Galvan

Hello readers (all three of you)! I am so excited to announce my most recent pedagogical discovery. The key to learning new things is flashcards. I know, this discovery is cutting edge and innovative. Students make a card for every theorem or definition that has a diagram and/or a given statement on the front and the (correct) If-Then statement on the back. Then, they use the flashcards to quiz themselves or a friend. I know that I should immediately run out to publish my discovery in a journal. Maybe I should present at an upcoming conference? The world needs to know!!! All silliness aside, learning many new rules day after day is hard. They not only need to know the correct wording, they also need to master when to use each one so that they can correctly draw conclusions. In years past I hadn't required flashcards, but inspired by increased attention to learning strategies that are supported by cognitive science (read Make it Stick , you just have to), flashcards seemed t...

Last week in Algebra (well the week before retreat) we started our unit on graphing linear equations. Generally we begin with tables and move quickly toward graphing via intercepts, the slope formula and slope-intercept. This year being my first time through with truly interleaved daily problem sets , they had already had several opportunities to remember from pre-algebra graphing via tables and calculating slope via counting rise over run from a graph. Hence, right away we were able to dig in to more detailed tasks. On day 1 after playing polygraph (lines), they began thinking about MAP's  Comparing Value for Money: Baseball Jerseys . From: http://map.mathshell.org/lessons.php?collection=8&unit=8200 They worked in pairs and quickly established that the price per t-shirt corresponds to the slope and that the one-off print set cost was the y-intercept. Actually graphing on paper was harder as I gave them a graph that went from 0 - 500 for the range and 0 to 25 for ...

So every year around this time, my school shuts down and takes all the kids on retreat. I typically accompany upwards of 200 9th graders on a canoe trip down the Colorado River. It is an awesome trip and a great way for the class to bond. I have this year off though and while I will miss being part such a formative experience for my students, I am so excited to sleep in my own bed and get caught up with work and blogging. Week 7 = catch up on grading, planning, blogging and interleaving project. The last few weeks in algebra have been challenging for my students as we have been exploring complicated word problems. We worked on showing our thinking by writing and labeling all helpful expressions for a problem. The most challenging were the coin problems, interest problems and mixture problems. For each type, I lead my class through a discussion on how to translate the verbal expressions to algebraic ones. While it wasn't lecture, it also wasn't inquiry. A few days after w...

True, to form, it is has taken me to the end of week 3 to finish my week 2 post... Highlights: Tuesday  in Geometry, students learned to use Geogebra while also learning about transformations - prompt here . Wednesday  in Geometry was spent reviewing for a quiz and writing their own chains of reasoning blog. Prompt: Examples: Annie         Andrew       Caroline In algebra, we are spending a lot of time taking questions on homework. Sometimes 10 minutes, which in a 40 minute class, is a significant potion of time.  Interleaved problem sets are harder, which is the point. The reasoning behind mixed over masses practice is that having to go from topic to topic forces the learner to concentrate more. More thinking = more retention. So yes there are lots of questions as they are remembering a lot of different concepts, but the time spent for homework review is  valuable. I am reading Creating Cultures of Thinking and lat...

How does a month go by without reflecting on what is and isn't happening in my classroom? Well this month's excuses include: getting sick, parenting (they still can't prepare their own food, come on, when I was 5...), teaching, prepping and grading for my UCLA class , getting sick again, general end of the year hullabaloo, grading finals, grading final projects ( like this one  and this one ) and spending quality time calculating grades. I did maintain a well used "to blog" sticky note, so there is that. Like last year, I had my students write a self-evaluation-ish reflection as their last blog post for the year. I made small changes to the prompt and gave them 25 minutes to start writing in class. Also, like last year, reading them made me tear up. I would like to share a few of them, but these posts feel a bit personal and I don't want to seem too self-aggrandizing by linking to posts that were complimentary. To sum it up, while not all of my 86 student...

I celebrated the 100th day of school yesterday by giving my Algebra students a test on factoring. Traditionally this has been a challenging unit and I was anxious to see if the more frequent assessments and feedback via Standards Based Grading would bolster their results. I haven't tabulated results yet, but I noticed students are still struggling to know when to use which rule. General trinomial factoring with a coefficient of x squared was confused for grouping and sums of squares were too often factored into conjugates. The good news is that I will continue to assess these skills (albeit infrequently) through the end of the year. Active Grade will continue to track their progress. I am 2 chapters into Make it Stick and I am already an Inter-leaver! I spent the weekend reworking my assignments to include random "spiral review." Review questions will pop up on skill quizzes and unit tests too. Lastly, I am thinking of reordering the order I teach the concepts. No...