It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I have something valuable to contribute.
I love teaching. I love learning and experimenting with new strategies. I love challenges. I love finding creative solutions to problems that arise. So I should love this new COVID teaching world, right?
Ugh. This year I feel like I spend more time complaining than I do finding solutions. My students are working so hard and I’m so proud of them, but I also know how much better it could be and then I cry. I’m working harder than I ever have before, but with much worse results and much less fun. I really feel like I suck at teaching.
So I really value days like today, where I finally felt like I did something right. This is already one of my favorite lessons ever (!!!) so I knew I had to replicate it for the COVID classroom. (See this blog post for the non-COVID version)
Like everything I’ve done this year, I’ve tried to reimagine how I can get the same interaction and learning outcomes from students in this ever-changing environment. (edit: and boy, do I mean ever-changing!!! The day after this post, I was evacuated from my home in SoCal for the second time this year due to wildfires, and school was moved online for the rest of the week due to air quality. Good thing I had this fabulous lesson already built for distance learning! *pats self on back*) I wanted students to have the space to notice and wonder about key features of polynomial graphs, and I needed to be able to dole out each task as each team successfully completed the one before.
This is a monster card sort. I love Desmos, but Desmos cannot handle my monster card sort. Instead I took an idea from my daughter’s second grade teacher: Mrs. V will use Google slides with fill in the blank sentences and a word bank made of draggable images in the margins that my daughter can move to complete the sentence. I made my cards images in the margins that students could cut and paste onto the correct slides. As each team finished task #1 and correctly answered my checkpoint question, I dropped the task #2 slide into their team slide deck.
Students answered the checkpoint question in writing and also verbally in their breakout rooms. 
Students filled in the missing information on the blue card. 
Students summarized their thinking in a note to their future forgetful self.
I’m teaching in a hybrid model, so I had students both in-person and online working on this task. Online students worked in breakout rooms and “asked for help” when they were ready to answer my checkpoint question (they answered in writing on the task slide, as well as verbally in their breakout room). Since we were using Google slides, in-person students could share cards while staying socially distant and while having not-so-quiet conversations about key features of the graphs.
The collaboration between students – both in-person and in breakout rooms – was phenomenal. Students noticing patterns about the behavior near zeros, describing end behavior, figuring out what “multiplicity” means without me telling them, … To finish it off, we gave students time to summarize, organize, and make meaning of everything they observed in this task in a “Note to my future forgetful self” (#thinkingclassroom).
I feel like I’m actually teaching again.
Shoutout to Peter Liljedahl and his spectacular #thinkingclassrooms book. It is full of practical and highly impactful research-based strategies for math teachers to get students to think in math class. More posts later on how much I enjoyed this book.
Resources: This is my teacher version of the Google slide deck. When I made copies for teams, I removed tasks #2, 3, and 4, as well as the answers and “note to my future forgetful self” then copied those slides back into each team’s slide deck as needed.
Reflections from the K-Building 