Wednesday, February 18, 2015

First Email Exchange

First, a few pics of my inspiration for this. I should mention that I am a minimalist at heart and could deal with this room, as is, forever. I know, though, that the kids can't stand it.





My first reply to Abby:
How's this for a start? I answered in-line in some bluish-purplish color. I am color blind. 

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 10:48 PM, Abby Roza; wrote:
Hi Ben- The posts are a great place to start and you have a neat idea. 
My initial questions are these:
Do you have a vision for what the final task/ project outcome would look like?
The final task/project would look like a crazily painted room as each group will be given (somewhat) carte blanche for their area. I'll post pictures of what it looks like now on the blog. Speaking of which, do you have any interest in co-blogging this with me? You could start a sister-site or give me stuff to post on mine. Just an idea. Seriously, though, I think you'll get your answer more fully several questions below.

How much time do you want students to spend on the unit?
I was thinking of doing this for several units. Our state (LA) outlined the following units for Algebra I:
  1. Solving Single-variable Equations and Inequalities
  2. Linear Equations and Inequalities
  3. Systems of Linear Equations and Inequalities
  4. Evaluating Functions
  5. Linear and Exponential Functions
  6. Arithmetic with Polynomials
  7. Solving Quadratic Equations
  8. Quadratic Functions
  9. Radical Functions
  10. Piecewise Functions
  11. Bivariate Statistics
  12. Univariate Statistics
I can definitely see using this to entirely teach Units 1-3 and maybe even Unit 4, too. I don't foresee there ever being a year where I finish all 12 Units. Honestly, we'll probably only get through Unit 8 this year. I try to touch on some of the other stuff throughout the year. Ideally, I'd love to find projects for the rest, too. I have a pretty good quadratic project, but let's cross one bridge at a time.

My gut feeling, which may be wrong, is that the students (partly because they haven't done PBL before) will need lots of structure to be successful. (Many of these structures were addressed in the webinar - the benchmarks and check ins, the playlists, the small group lessons). Do you think so?
I think that structure is definitely needed. The question is what kind of structure. I would love for the vast majority of skills to be learned via exploration with maybe a few nudges. I don't expect them to figure out how to solve systems of equations algebraically, but I think I can be structure where they can figure out a lot of stuff on their own. That aside, structure is definitely needed (for me!) to keep them on task and moving forward. I think we should come up with a list of "things" we need for each unit and each sub unit. Off of the top of my head:

For each unit:
  • Skills lists.
  • Rubrics
  • Tasks
  • Pre-knowledge Assessments
  • Review/scaffolding (flipped...?)
  • Student (and teacher) checklists
For each sub unit (or skill)
  • Practice
  • Assessments
  • Learning Resources
    • Notes
    • Videos
    • Interactive Websites (Desmos, etc.)
  • Opportunities for writing/explaining
    • Blogs
    • Job quotes
    • Emails
    • Summaries
    • Tutorials
    • Discussion Board
  • Remediation and Enrichment
 Where are you with thinking what this might look like? 
Ha! I wish it were that easy. That's why I've been trying to find someone to do this with. My vision: From Day 1, they are given the task at hand: painting my room or making a garden or building picnic tables (fund raiser?). There are activities that help them review or explore operations with signed numbers. They need to submit a quote for the job showing all costs for parts and labor. They would have another document for their team showing profit, etc. Parts of these would double as an introduction to writing and solving 1-step equations and be a great segway to 2-step equations. They would research not only prices of materials to buy, but justify why their choices are the best choices. They would create graphs, for example, showing quotes for painting different types and areas (doors, interior, exterior, corners, trim, etc.). We could also incorporate statistics into this for averages, etc. From here, it should be pretty "easy" to provide (or have them provide) certain constraints, creating systems of both equations and inequalities to solve. I think that functions and function notation (Unit 4) could probably be interwoven throughout, leaving just a little (if any) at the end.

Each step along the way would contain practice problems for fluency as well as other application problems. I would want to give paper assessments to make sure that the project knowledge was being translated to other applications as well as the "abstract" algebra.

The last post mentions flipping your classroom. Have you been doing that? How much? 
I am currently flipping the remedial algebra community college course that I teach. It's bare bones right now, and I am about to grade their first assessment, but I like it and can't wait to improve upon it. I need to see how they do and how they feel about it.

Last and most important question - How could I be involved? What would be a role for me that would be helpful for you?
How do you want to be involved? I'll take anything and everything, from getting help to being help. I think that two minds are definitely better than one, so you can help in whatever way you feel comfortable. Our students are different and will need different things. What I want to do is create a framework suitable to many projects. Kind of plug-and-play.

August seems like a good timeline to me. 
Yay!!! Butterflies!!! 

Abby


On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 8:28 AM, Benjamin Morris wrote:
Check these three posts out. I've done some more mental processing since then, but this is a good start.


I started blogging about it, but this is as far as I got. I need someone to keep me progressing. My goal would be to have it ready to go for August...

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 12:57 AM, Abby Roza wrote:
Hi Benjamin,

I was on the GMD webinar tonight and was intrigued by your note that you have a PBL idea for algebra you'd like to collaborate on. I would very much be interested in hearing more, both about your idea and how you'd like to collaborate. 


I also want to note that I don't have much experience designing or implementing project based learning. (But I'm eager! and hard working!)

I currently teach Adult Basic Education to Adults. The new GED is a goal for many of my students. It is heavy on Algebra and many of my students either did not take or did not understand Algebra in K-12, so I am guessing the math content I teach would mesh well with what you are considering for the project's content. 


Looking forward to hearing from you. 
Abby


Getting the ball rolling...

I attended the BigMarker webinar "Project-Based Learning for Mathematical Practices" hosted bZack Miller and Kyle Moye on Tuesday, 2/4/2015. It was great to hear some more ideas on project-based curriculum and instruction and it really got my mind churning. I offered up my email address to anyone who might want to collaborate and was lucky to be approached by Abby Roza. We have decided to start forging through this process. Other volunteers are more than welcome. For the next several posts, I'm going to simply cut and paste our email conversations to show our thought process. Once we start compiling deliverables, etc., I will post those. Check out my previous posts for the intro to this idea.