Building Thinking Classrooms: Planning for Winter 2024

 I am hosting a professional learning community for my state-level organization (SBCTC) and am sharing some thoughts on how I am planning my next term, using the Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) framework. Below is the post I made on December 20th 2023 to our internal discussion forum.

If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about the BTC framework, post it below!

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I am teaching MATH 104 Finite Mathematics with Support next term, and want to weave thinking questions throughout the course . This corequisite support course allows students can enter the course with below college level placement, and earn college credit in one term instead of two. These students are majoring in business, accounting, or other programs, eventually need to take MATH&148 Business Calculus. The course covers linear equations, systems of linear equations, linear programming, the Simplex method, functions (polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic), financial math, and annuities.

Having tried thinking questions in MATH&146 Introduction to Statistics, I'll be focusing on specific computational skills that students usually have difficulty with. The example on factoring from page 27 of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (BTC) is a good model to start with for curriculum-aligned tasks; ask a question about prior knowledge, extend it, then "ask students to do something without telling them how" (BTC pg. 35). For most topics I feel like I have ideas of how I might go about this (famous last words!) but the non-curricular tasks are a bit of a puzzle. What question(s) will capture student's attention and get them thinking?

I've taught this and the 'standard' version of this course (MATH 105 Finite Mathematics) before, and one area that all of these students have a deep interest in is money. How to earn it, how to spend it, how to lose it, scams on getting more, they are interested in every opportunity to exchange currency for goods and services. Unfortunately we don't cover much of that material until the end of the term, and with a recent change in textbooks I am not setup to move topics around, yet. One of the questions I ask at the end of the annuities section is "How are you going to retire?" It requires estimating how much money students will need on a monthly basis in retirement, calculating the present value of those regular payments over time (an annuity), and then much money they will need to put into a retirement account in terms of a future value annuity. If a student can do this then I am fairly confident that they understand annuities. Most students are very interested in answering this question, and will change variables to test out other assumptions and see what has a bigger impact; interest rates, time, or payments.

So why not start there? Here's my plan for the first day;

• Brief introductions: course name, me, who the course is for.
• Pose the question: How much money will you need to retire? Chapter 9 of BTC has some specific recommendations about hints, but for the start I'll pose the question and see how they respond. I'm planning on letting them think through their answers for 20 minutes, and have groups report for another 20 minutes. I am hoping some students might assign variables for unknowns, and use them in their answer. Here are a few hints I'll share based on where they have trouble. 
  • How much money do you think you'll need a month?
  • When do you anticipate retiring?
  • How long do you think you will be in retirement?
  • In mathematics, if you don't know a quantity, how do we give it a 'name'?
• POGIL activities: one on how to work in groups, and the other about the syllabus.

I am very tempted to provide guidance, variables, and other 'hints'. At the same time my framing of the thinking question will be something like "I want to see what you can do, AND I want you to see what you can do." Providing additional supports would kind of defeat that goal.

For the rest of the week I'll share some other thoughts and planning using the BTC framework, specifically some thoughts on grading, testing out some curriculum-aligned questions, and other thoughts.

 

 

Planning: Summer 2021

I'm thinking about what I want to do for the summer and have a few thoughts I want to share here and see if anyone has suggestions, ideas, or recommendations. My summer runs from Tuesday, June 22nd to Thursday, September 9th, a total of 79 days.

• In my role as chairperson I am expected to spend 10 days over the summer working. Our Summer term is about eight weeks so I figure if I work the same day each week I can respond to emails, and move the ball on some smaller projects, like;
• move department documents to our Teams site
• move department leadership documents to a separate Teams site
• think of how to facilitate the department in creating a mission statement with values that would support...
• determine what committees, job functions, and roles are important to the math department in preparation for a conversation about how faculty want to use their service time to the college that reflects our department mission statement
• create online homework for a professional-technical course we are working on this term
• work with student services on a revision to our math placement process
• review corequisite support data from the past few years
• work with our institutional research group to build dashboards and determine other reporting needs

A highly respected colleague once told me that you only get 20% of your summer to-do list accomplished, so you think of the important things you want to focus on and not stress on the other stuff. Not sure what that 20% is from the list above, but I'm sure I'll know by the end of the summer.  

• Read Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman with a group of colleagues from my department. 
  
  
• On April 23rd I went to a WAMATYC virtual session Thinking About Assessment and Grading Differently: Standards-Based Grading in MATH& 141 and MATH& 142 by Matt Lewis and Michal Ramos from Yakima Valley College. In the session they shared that in earning a ESCALA Certificate in College Teaching and Learning in Hispanic Communities they wanted to revise their precalculus courses to use highly equitable classroom practices, including standards based grading. I've seen other implementations of standards based grading, competency based learning, and other schemes, but what set this one apart was their setup for measuring each learning objective (LO), and how they awarded grades. Each learning objective got its own rubric, for example this was their initial general rubric;
  
  
  
  
  In the presentation they shared that this general rubric wasn't great for every learning objective, and thus revised them for each objective. Here is an example of a specific LO;
  
  
  
  Students demonstrated their abilities for each LO through a variety of assignments, using WAMAP's internal objective tracking.
  
  The most unique part (to me anyway) was their use of these rubrics to determine a student's grade. These rubrics weren't just abstract things for faculty to worry and fret over, and students may or may not have thought much about, no! These rubrics mattered in a real and substantial way. 
  
  
  
  So students couldn't pass the course if they didn't at least try every topic, and couldn't get an A unless they were expert in at least 20 topics of the 24, with at most 4 topics being proficient. This is related to something I struggle with a lot, explaining to students how their grade is reflective of their understanding of the course material. With this scheme, I hope, the connection is made clear.
  
  From the data they presented it seemed clear that gaps in performance persisted, but the overall distribution of grades shifted to more A's and B's, AND student's subsequent performance in their next math course went up as compared to past students. 
  
  For the summer I would like to take my corequisite business math course and build this into the course for the Fall term. To do this I am going to have to change my homework system to WAMAP, build in the learning objectives into the course, develop assignments that align, and figure out how to show a student's current grade in our LMS, along with a host of other things I'm not aware of right now. (Feeling some very Around the World in Eighty Days vibes here where I know what I have to do, but unsure of exactly how I'll do it.) Each of these is a pretty big task, but for each I have either done this for another course, can leverage materials from past iterations of WAMAP material, or, over the summer, devote some deep work time to it.
  
  I should also note that I will be teaching this course face-to-face in the fall, and it is unlikely I'll be able to use many of my existing active learning group activities as we may still be social distancing. With the instructional upheaval I'm going to have to think about, it makes sense to make big changes to grading and assignments so that there is a coherent structure. I'd like to do some amount of flipping the prerequisite topics, this being a corequisite course we cover prerequisite topics as needed to prepare students for course-level material. 
  
  
•  I'd really like the chance to do something that utilizes some old or skills I am trying to develop over the summer that is self-contained. A paid opportunity would be nice, but I am open to the right volunteer job. I'm looking on UpWork and will be posting something on LinkedIn at the end of the month about my availability, but I'd like to stretch and do something like;
  
• A month long project designing a training course or materials for a corporate client.
• Accuracy checking a K-12 or undergrad textbook. 
• Help an edtech company make or test a product or service using Canvas' Python API.
• Create a course, learning objectives, assignments, assessments, or other instructional design and curriculum development tasks in an LMS I don't have experience with. 
• Volunteer for a non-profit to setup a Moodle instance, develop learning activities, and/or support tutors in using technology to meet students.
  
  
• The POGIL Activity Clearninghouse has activities for review that I'd like to look at, and I'd like to submit some of my trigonometry activities. I think I have enough activities for a text, but I'm the only one who's used them and have had only a couple looked at by others. I'm just not sure what this would look like and am unsure if this is a months-long project or a years-long project. 
  
  
• Home projects, the list that never seems to get shorter. 
• repaint the interior of our house (master bedroom, living room, hallway, main bath, kitchen, parts of entryway)
• test colors for exterior painting
• back bathroom sink fixed
• back porch drainage fixed
• dog door installed to our back yard
• landscape the remaining 25 ft. length of hellscape
• replace a 30 ft. length of wooden fence
• repair floors
• tend to the vegetable garden

On reflection it seems that I could perform chair duties on Tuesdays, work on home projects in the morning and weekends, and during the heat of the day work on building my course for the fall and/or on an outside project. I would like to have my activities accepted by POGIL and printed as a text, and may need to fit that in when I can. We do have a few camping trips planned, so I'll have to think about fitting tasks around those.

What are your plans for the summer? Any projects you're thinking about but are unsure of how to start? Summer tasks you always mean to get to, but never manage to? Getting a COVID vaccine and living out of a backpack for a month or two?