Summer 2020 Thoughts - College Trigonometry

For various reasons I am teaching three classes this summer, and because of the coronavirus pandemic I'm teaching them all online through Canvas. Having taught online courses off and on since 2012 I'm comfortable teaching in this modality, but as is my nature, I'm looking to improve the student experience and their ability to learn the course material. I'm writing down the following thoughts so I can look back on my rationale for making certain decisions, to share them with others, and to backtrack on any coding ideas I'd like to follow up on.

Homework

I've taught College Trigonometry a number of times before and have a well developed set of homework questions through WAMAP, which I'll use again. I would like to align homework assignments and questions to course outcomes, and WAMAP has a way to track this so I may give it a shot this term. My goal here would be to give students specific feedback on the areas they need to work on, and to give me a dashboard of where students are doing well, and need help with.

Discussion Forums

I also created a number of group-based active learning discussion forums last term in the switch to remote learning. Below is an example.

I really like having having a first post where students explore an idea or concept through simple exploratory questions. This is in keeping with the POGIL activity writing framework, and works well to get students started thinking about these ideas. I also like that students must share their first post without seeing the work other's did to get a sense of what others are thinking, and to show that incorrect answers are completely normal. What didn't work so well last term was getting students to discuss their answers to these questions. I believe this was partially because their second post was to answer a number of questions in a longer activity, with many students seeing this activity as a 'worksheet' to complete like an additional homework assignment.

Over time my directions to both of these two initial posts changed, making sure to indicate that saying "I don't know." is a perfectly fine answer, but then students would just write that and not go back to the discussion forums. There were situations where students did have engaging discussions starting from these activities, but the students who had these discussions usually had very high affective motivation. The groups that I struggled most with were students who either had low affective motivation, or those who had a very solutions oriented view of mathematics. I will likely need to make explicit the purpose of these discussion forums, and to model what a good discussion forum looks like.

Subsequent replies were supposed to be completed with the following directions;

The above roles were a slight modification of my face-to-face roles, and after the last term it seems clear that I need to make a few changes;

• Roles need to be tied into a deliverable, some 'thing' students do or say at the end of the discussion that shows that they fulfilled the role. For Presenters this could be a group answer or solution to a question where students have to use what they learned in the activity (a POGIL application question), for Reflectors this could be a deeper reflection on the group's work together, for Quality Controller this could be a series of questions about the quality of the group's work, and for Managers this could be a set of questions about who worked well in the group and what students could do to improve. 
• At the end of each week last term I had students complete a group reflection by Thursday so I could post answers to any questions on Friday. For the summer term I think I could have students answer role-based reflection quizzes.
• I assigned roles at the start of each week in a 'Meet your group' discussion forum, but wonder if there are more automatic ways of doing this? I would also really like some kind of notification or color to be the background of discussion forums where they need to post in their roles. CSS maybe?

With multiple deadlines of posts students found it difficult to know when to post. To address this I added reminders in the course calendar of when to post. The reminders are just text, but I figured out you can add links to the assignments themselves. Here is what it looked like in the Canvas calendar;

In playing with the Canvas API I did find a way to create calendar events, and may play with that over the term.

Closer to the end of the course, once groups were well established I included Group Help Discussion Forums, like the following;

This format was borrowed from one of my colleagues Kayoko Barnhill, and is a really nice low effort way to get students talking. For the summer term I may alternate the discussion forums between one to two group-based activity discussion forums, and one of these group help discussion forums. There may be more cognitive load in following different sets of directions at first, but I think students may appreciate the reduced time commitment.

Quizzes

Each week I had a quiz over the course material with five questions and spent the plurality of my time each week grading them and providing feedback. This term I'll be doing similar quizzes, but only providing detailed feedback on two of them. Here are the directions I ended the term with and plan on using this term;

Directions

Submit your work for the quiz. Note the following;

• Your work submission should be the work you did in getting your answers to quiz.
• You will earn partial credit by showing your work, step by step.
• You will not earn any additional credit for submitting the incorrect answers in the quiz and submitting the correct answer in your work.
• You will not earn credit for questions that you answered correctly with no work.
• You will not earn credit for solutions that utilize technology (graphing calculators, WolframAlpha, Desmos, etc.) unless specified to in the question.

I will review all of their questions this term for showing work, but will only grade two of their questions in detail.

Final Assessment

I had a final assessment consisting of twenty questions, ten True or False, and ten similar to the homework. A few of my colleagues had questions about the efficacy of True or False questions in a final assessment, pointing out that they should be fairly easy to determine by students. I agreed, but argued that we believe they are easy to determine if the statement is correct or not, and that is not that purpose of these questions. The purpose is to determine if students know how to determine if the statement is correct or not. Below are three questions and their results;

While all students were able to answer the last question above correctly, a number had difficulty with the first two. This suggests to me that students don't have a developed understanding of either inverse functions, or what cos(-x) means. If that is the case then I would be very concerned about their ability to do well in calculus, and subsequently by not answering this question (and others) incorrectly their chances of passing this class decrease. And really, what is the point of a final assessment in a math class other than to determine if a student is ready for the next class?

I did have students write down their work and submit it to me, and overall the quality and work was consistent with their quiz work submissions. Reviewing all of their work took quite a bit of time, but it was made easier by WAMAP's ability to review individual questions, even though I randomized the order the questions students were given. I did not provide as detailed feedback, but did award partial credit where warranted. 

I did not use proctoring software, and actually gave students a few days to take the final with a time limit of 2 hours 30 minutes. They were required to complete an academic affidavit (below) before accessing the final, which was to automatically release after signing the affidavit.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the final assessment from last term, and will likely keep the format, change some of the questions, and ask for online proctoring if available. 

Weekly Overviews

Each week I also wrote a weekly overview page that included student-friendly learning objectives, their course tasks, additional resources, and how to get help. I may keep these, making sure to include them in student's To-Do list (a feature in Canvas that adds content pages to their course calendars), but may also include some of this information in a Monday email or at least summarize it. I've read over the fall term plans of faculty at other institutions and they seem to like multiple communication methods, or at least find that students respond to them differently. 

In writing down the above I've come to a few tasks for myself;

• Rework the discussion forums to include one to two group activities, and one group help discussion forum each week.
• Reformat reflections to be role-based, possibly sharing the results anonymously with students to further our conversations about group work, what high quality work looks like, and to reflect on our experiences. 
• Try to complete the course outcomes in WAMAP.
• Find a way to automate discussion forum reminders. I'm still learning the ins-and-outs of the Canvas API and of Python, so this may be a goal through the term.
• Update Weekly Overviews and include them in a Monday Week-in-Preview email. On second thought I'm not sure I like having separate ways of communicating with students, I'd rather have everything done through Canvas. Sure, students can opt to get information sent to their email or text, Canvas has pretty robust notification settings. At the same time I've had to deal with multiple communication methods in work place settings, and it can be bewildering to figure out where something came from. It generally seems to run counter to Quality Matters, and the best practices I have seen for online education. I could try it... I'll have to mull it over more. 

Writing this out has given me a good idea of what I need to do today, and I'll try to write something similar for my other two classes this summer Finite Mathematics and Business Math, and Business Calculus. I've already decided I'll be doing something less involved for these two classes, and have quite a few materials already developed.

As always I appreciate any feedback, suggestions, questions, ideas, recommendations for books or articles, accusations, or anything else you'd like to share.

Notes on 'POGIL Best Practices in an Asynchronous Environement'

Here are my notes from my later viewing of the POGIL Best Practices in an Asynchronous Environment webinar by Claire Major and Kevin Forgard.

• Focus is on asynchronous environments, using POGIL principles, not necessarily 'How to do POGIL online.'
• Planning online courses;
• (Claire) Backwards design is a good start (learning objectives, assessments, processes, etc.) Our own experiences (and lack of) in online learning makes teaching online more difficult. 
• (Kevin) Purposeful course design is one thing we have to do for all courses, but online there is much more planning, how to organize learners, how are we going to communicate, more front loading of assignments and materials, etc. 
• (K) If given a course and asked to 'plug-and-play' that can be difficult for some instructors. 
• (K) In thinking about group work and POGIL principles, how are we going to plan to be in the discussion forums, roles, management, etc. What about online skill sets of individuals? (First time online learner, etc.)
• What about blended, hybrid, hy-flex models?
• How can we make an engaged online experience?
• (K) Community of Inquiry Framework - Cognitive presence, teaching presence, social presence. Online courses is not taking face-to-face courses and putting them online, need to adapt. Need to think about formative assessments and how that informs your next steps/JiTT.
• (K) The use of videos doesn't have to be high production. As an example, a finance instructor took a short video in front of a bank and discussed what are banks, why we need them, whats the purpose of them. What about students creating videos?
• (K) Communicating systems beyond emails and discussion boards, Slack and Teams given a more flexible way, less formal to communicate that isn't open to the internet. You as the faculty member are modeling what it means to communicate, and really leading the course. 
• (C) Engagement - the cognitive part (deep thinking, intellectual effort) and the affective part (feeling, sensing). How can we motivate students to learn, wanting to learn, valuing the task, etc. If we don't have that part the course really isn't going to happen. There are things we can do to provide motivation; creating authentic tasks, students create professional products, etc. Make the material deep, meaningful, connected to their personal lives, relevant, etc. 
• (C) We also need to plan for their cognitive engagement. Is it that some students don't try very hard, or don't know how to try very hard? Do students know how to perform deep learning vs. shallow learning. In thinking about our tasks we have to think about how do we move them from lower levels of intellectual engagement to higher levels. We can do that regardless of the task. Passive learning isn't a thing, even in lectures where you have to listen actively. 
• (C) If tasks are 'low level' then they could be moved up Bloom's Taxonomy by developing meta-cognition and/or analysis of these skills. (Ex Solving equations, moving from solving to determining when/how to improve on solving them.) We can create tasks that move students from low-level to high-level cognition. 
• How do we create this engaging environment online? We can do this ad-hoc in our class rooms, but online this is more difficult. 
• (C) Scaffolding! Ex. videos that convey information, we could use scaffolded guided notes. At the start of the term the notes may be fuller, contain more questions, etc. and later on in the term contain less. 
• How to scaffold the group work assignments?
• (K) By the end of the course we want there to be a metacognitive learning development, almost like a secondary learning objective. To get them there we have to scaffold the process. 
• (K) At the start of the term we could have very well defined roles, points for following those roles, etc. As the term goes on we could remove those scaffolds so by the end of the term, students are able to work on their own w/o our micromanaging. This could work for many levels of students.
• (K) Build your discussions with these external motivators (sticks and carrots, grades) in mind, and removing them over the course of the term. We know we've succeeded because there is a natural dialog that happens. It really is about planning. 
• "What's the end goal in mind?" POGIL Process Skills are part of the course and building them in. Let's talk about one of these and how we would build it into an online course. 
• (K) We want students to develop these higher order thinking skills. What about critical thinking? Are the learning outcomes aligned to those critical thinking skills? Can we have students take these ideas to the next level? (Project-based learning. Padlet) Critical thinking is really about getting students to develop mental models and externalize them, what are the schemas, how do they express that? Critical thinking is about creating that evidence, their rational, etc.
• How do we do that online?
• (K) Collaborative tools online. Ex. Google doc creating a common assignment. Using communication tools. Many of us think about the LMS as a delivery tool, but we can also use it to have students create tools. What about a lesson where we ask students to write a lesson, which turns into an electronic artefact? It could be added to a student's portfolio, 
• What about metacognition?
• (C) Structure and build over the term. Start out with short tasks and build up to bigger reflections. If I'm lecturing or in videos, pencutate it with a question "What are you doing right now? Write it down on a piece of paper." Students are surprised by how they lose focus. In videos there may be a question of "Is this now on 1.5x speed?" Create awareness of what their brains are doing?
• (C) Reflect on what students have done and learned. "What is the most important thing you learned?" 
• (C) In online courses have used 'ungrading assignments', where a certain portion of the grade is determined by students and how they want to be graded. Through the term ask a series of T/F questions on how they did. Ex. "I read all the assignments.", "I tried as much as I could have." etc.
• (C) Later on in the course ask students to do self-reflection, how they did as learners, how their preferences for learning helped them, extraneous things prevented them from course work.
• (C) "So what?" or "What now?" reflection assignments where you ask students "So you learned this material, what are you going to do with it?" or "Now that you've learned this material, what are you going to do with it?"
• (C) Create a personal learning environment through a concept map of how to learn the material after the term. 
• (C) Start with small things and build to bigger things to help them think about their learning, and how to think about themselves as learners. 
• What about student-to-student learning? What do I need to do online to create a format that can help that happen? What can I do as an instructor to promote group work?
• (K) Humanizing the experience. Creating a culture in the online course. What is the tone? Humor? Pathos or ethos? How do you model it? Students look to us. 
• (K) POGIL Roles, Reflector Roles, the opportunity to say "What happens in the group?" This is more about reflecting back on the group not instructors.
• (K) Make sure to have a good icebreaker discussion. "What is your gif?" Each week have a 'fun' discussion. At first it should be modeled, but over time it could be 
• (K) Want discussion boards to not be very formal, really want the comment sections on social media, YouTube, etc. Ex. a video of painting a ceiling with comments. How do we get students to do what they do out in the open internet in our classrooms with our learning objectives. 
• (C) Students are going to be communicating with each other. There will be 'back channel' discussion. How to put discussions into productive use?
• (C) Short informal videos. First is introducing themselves and really basic. Need to establish rapport. 
• (C) Build in group-work to ensure communication. Student work is done independently and is then contributed to the group so everyone has something to add. Don't want communication to become a problem.
• (C) In discussion boards have been difficult; wanting to replicate the in-class experience and it becomes really stilted. Discussions are very important, but they have to be structured differently. Weekly create for students that are shared out with students. Must be intentional with how discussion forums are structured to support communication centered on the learning outcomes. Communication for communication's sake isn't very helpful. 
• What about the asynchronous component? Social media is asynchronous communication. Are there timing hints we should build into the course. 
• (C) For me its about inclusiveness. Some students may not be on a laptop with a high-speed internet connection. They may be on a phone. No synchronous sessions. Assume students are not going to have not great internet access.
• (C) To get around this students have used Twitter, use videos for online discussions, but try to use low bandwidth tools and low communication tools.
• Last term we did things because we had to. What advice would you give faculty who are planning for fall. Could by hybrid, online, etc. What should instructors think about now for their fall classes?
• (K) Plan for the fact that students are taking online courses who may not have the resources or tools. Ask students at the beginning what their situation is. Have a survey over your needs and how you can adjust your needs. We want to meet the needs of students, and try to get them the resources they need. 
• (K) Plan on things messing up, so have some contingency plans in place. Mistakes happen.
• (C) Have taught hyflex with online course materials, with f2f sessions that included students Zooming in. Having contingency plans is critical. Be ready to pivot asynchronously. 
• (C) Even if nothing happens, there will be some students who can't come. How will we help those students?
• The biggest frustration of faculty is "How can I be ready for everyone, AND create an active learning environment that achieves my learning objectives, AND has all the high goals I want for students?" Nothing is as it is expected. 
• The traditional POGIL approach would suggest a concurrent synchronous environment (Zoom breakout rooms) but include students/groups who can't meet during that time working through the activities. How can an instructor constructively help them move forward? POGIL facilitators can do that f2f, but how do we do that online in a discussion board? We want students to learn and own the material, but not answer the question for them?
• (C) It is really hard. Refer students to each other, ask students to respond to each other. Give them a way to respond. For example, there is a format for them to follow. Possibly a compliment, ask a question, make a connection, make a comment, etc. There are many formats for guiding responses. (ED: Scaffold the experience!)
• (K) The purpose of these activities and our presence is that we're providing feedback. The feedback should be aligned to our goals for the activity. If the groups are behaving in the same way in a copy/paste, provide individualized content-specific feedback. If students may not have energy for a group activity, provide the feedback 'Step it up.' What is your relationship with students?
• Deadlines. How strict should we be with deadlines?
• (C) For weekly modules there is a routine; watch a video, read, application exercise, study guide, quiz, discuss, and then build towards a final product. The same kinds of activities are due on the same day of the week. Structure and repitition is really helpful. 
• (C) Send an email each week that lays out what they need to be doing. Don't use announcements very much, unsure if students view them. 
• (C) Send a text via GroupMe and students really liked it. Use student tools. Use reminders. 
• (C) Not super strict by an hour or a day. 
• Recommended to read over the following POGIL page; https://pogil.org/teaching-online-during-the-covid-19-crisis
• On the hyflex course, is it like teaching two courses?
• (C) While there is a lot of work that goes into building a good online course, I do think of it as one course. There is an efficiency in having everything online. From now on face-to-face courses will likely have a strong online course site. 
• (K) When you create course material for hyflex, you create a learning artefact. We want to create course materials that can be reused over and over.
• (C) We're creating an interactive online text. 
• Last thoughts. 
• (K) We're in a strange place, and running into a big experiment of how online learning works and can work. We should think about taking ideas in POGIL and expand it online. We will make mistakes. 
• (C) Situation the pedagogy first, and use the technology to support the pedagogy. How will the tech let me do this? Let the pedagogy lead!

AMATYC 2019 Day 1 - Afternoon Review

I've been home for a few days and I think I'm just now getting my equilibrium back. I've had quite a few meetings with faculty and administrators, am in the middle of grading an assessment, am trying to put together the rationale for why we're updating our coreq support courses, trying to train new coreq instructors, and make sure to spend time with my family. I'm hoping to get through the rest of the conference by December? January? Don't quote me.

11:30 AM - On the Use of Reflective Writing Assignments

Anurag Katyal from Palm Beach State College had a great presentation on his use of a variety of readings, prompts, and quotes to get students to reflect on their own math experiences. He referenced Reflective Writing in Mathematics Education Programmes by McNaught (2010), so I'll have to read that at some point. Anurag discussed a variety of assignment logistics (time, length, etc.) he used as part of his continuous improvement of his teaching practice. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who tinkers.

The big takeaway was Anurag's rubric that he developed with colleagues in the English Department. I'm looking forward to reviewing it (as of 11/21 I haven't gotten a copy yet) and trying to borrow what I can. As I have no training in evaluating written work, my focus has always been evaluating a piece of writing for the student's intent. Are they looking to get this done as quickly as possible, or was the assignment done with sufficient completion, a term I've used in the past to mean:

"Making a good faith attempt at answering all questions in an assignment, showing your work, and completing the entire activity to the best of your ability. If you do not meet this criteria for an assignment that uses sufficient completion you will earn a zero (0) for that assignment. "

I was also impressed by the variety of readings Anurag asked students to complete and reflect on. I'm hoping to get that list and see how I can incorporate them into my courses. I routinely use my LMS's quiz feature for Check-Ins, short assignments asking students for feedback, to reflect, and to answer mathematical questions. Most of the feedback is centered around group work, and most reflection is around questions like "What was the stickiest point?", "What do you wonder?", "What is a question that would build understanding?", "What remaining questions do you have?" I've included some longer form reflections that require a reading, but these are kind of sporadic. It may be nice to organize these smaller reflections, interleaved with these larger reflections in a consistent way, possibly every Friday a bigger reflection....

12:00 - Mathematics Anxiety: What is it? Who has it? What can be done?

There was a good amount of references to look over (math anxiety was first discussed in 1957 by Dreger and Aiken), acknowledgement of cultural differences (China v. US), deficit theory and cognitive interference theory, who has it, and specific actions faculty can take to address it; 10 minute write-out before an exam where students just write what they know, fewer smaller exams, address negative math attitudes, normalize struggle, acknowledge the struggle of famous people, and identify diverse role models. All-in-all, a good session, but nothing really new for me.

12:40 - Using Faculty Collaboration to Design and Improve Corequisite Courses

This was a good session on a Texas' CCs design and implementation of coreq courses. The level of internal organization of the department was the most interesting part of the presentation, as they had faculty teams with faculty leads for college algebra and business math, statistics, and quantitative reasoning (non-STEM) courses. Each of the three courses had different balances of prerequisite content and course content. The college algebra course was fairly front loaded with prereq content, but more and more course content was added over time. The quantitative reasoning course had some weeks where prereq content was the majority, and other weeks where course content was the majority. The stats course had a fairly even split with an equal number of prerequisite topics each week. Below are some diagrams I sketched in my notes;

The presenters had quite a bit of data, but nothing was disaggregated by race. I asked whether they have done so, and they did not. I shared my own experience with not doing the same with an assessment project, and made it pretty clear that we can do better. I got sideways glances from the presenters for the rest of the conference, but I hope I made it clear; we must include equity data in all of our conversations.

I believe I took lunch at this point, at a bar across the street. I talked to a few people over writing questions in MyOpenMath and learned that David Lippman used PHP as the base language to write questions in. Good to know!

1:50 - Hitting the Mark: Organization for Optimal Outcomes

I walked into this session a little late, but Sarah Miller shared her organization methods for both teaching and into a little of her personal life. As someone with the following to-do list for the week, I was definitely interested.

She shared that she has a student intake form that providers her with a range of information about the student. On the back of the form she'll write notes about the student's progress, emails or messages the students sent, and other useful information. This seems close to a case management system an advisor would use for students, but would be really helpful for faculty. Using this she sees patterns, can piece together the student's life, and reach out when necessary.

She shared her methods for organizing her emails. She creates an email folder for each student! In my college's LMS this isn't necessary as you can already look at all the messages a student sent, but in Outlook this would be good only if students emailed me. Since Sarah gets so many emails she uses the 3-2-1-0 method of checking emails 3 times a day, 20 minutes a day, 1 touch. She shared her workflow to decide how to take care of it, or if its a task in itself. I thought that was an interesting way to think about some emails, a bigger project to tackle on its own.

The Thursday Keynote by Francis Su was heartwarming. He really pushed us to remember why we're doing what we're doing; to share a deeply human endeavor with our students. Below is the same (I believe) speech he gave to the MAA in 2017.


After that the exhibit hall opened, and it was a little strange how many people were waiting to get in. I guess there was swag for the first few people who entered? Not my scene. I went back to the hotel, relaxed, and met up with colleagues for dinner. But the night wasn't over, the last session was:

8:30 PM (What was I thinking?) - Procedural and Conceptual Skills in Algebra

My entire grading rubric is based on a balance of procedural skills and conceptual understanding, so I thought this was an important session to go to. I was hoping for something a bit more about how to differentiate these two areas when grading, but the session was about the presenter's work on using a number of psychometric measurements (latent class analysis, distractor analysis, and qualitative analysis of cognitive interviews) to get a better understanding of the relationship between a student's procedural skills and conceptual understanding. I've done a bit of reading on psychometrics, but haven't heard about any of these measures, another thing to read up on.

The latent class analysis piece seems the most interesting, as it would seem to partition students into groups based on their answers. This is a much more advanced version of what I do with my assessment analysis; group students by total scores and look at question averages for low, mid, and high performing student groups. Based on the analysis I may remove questions from grading if no group had a 60% average for a question, and other similar ways to address perceived imbalances of scores. A latent class analysis could give me a better way to separate these students into these groups, but it sounds like I may have to code questions and answers differently... Not sure, hence the reading.

Done with Day 1, not sure how long this review will take me. My wife went to bed 10 minutes ago, and I think I need to follow her lead. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, outrages, accusations, or ideas, you know what to do below.

AMATYC 2019 Day 1 - Morning Review

Day 1 of my first AMATYC conference was AMAZING! So many good sessions, amazing people, and great ideas.

8:00 AM - Math Pathways: Exploring the Present and Envisioning the Future

I attended the first few sessions (Helen Burn from Highline College, Amber Rust from Anne Arundel CC, and Michael Sullivan from Joliet Junior College) on their different Math Pathways implementations. Corequisite Support courses are an integral part in many Math Pathways implementations, and I thought I could glean some ideas or thoughts from these sessions. While the presenters were knowledgeable and thoughtful about their programs I didn't get much about corequisite support courses. Michael Sullivan did provide a great perspective on statistics education (TI calculators and Excel bad, Minitab and SPSS good) and some resources as well.  But really, any session moderated by Helen Burn is one worth attending, she's great.

9:10 AM - Teach Your Students How To Be Students: Scaffold Everything!

Amy Hatfield and Jessica Lickeri from Columbus State CC shared their very structured way of instilling foundational skills (their prefered word for success skills or study skills). They focused on multiple tasks that aligned to support specific success skills. For example, student's attendance grade is measured in three ways; completing a sign-in sheet during the first five minutes, staying during class, and coming prepared to class by completing certain tasks. I'm really interested in trying a few of their activities, and look forward to seeing how I can integrate their tasks into what I do.

Their main focus was on

A few small interesting things were shared;

• Menti is a pretty lightweight polling tool that looks really promising. 
• Instead of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development being focused on mathematical content, the presenters really stressed how we should think of foundational skills in the same way. I'm convinced with that argument, but I'm still on the fence as to whether requiring students to complete activities will help scaffold these skills. 
• They mentioned the use of an adaptive learning environment and were a bit cagey about sharing the name but I think it was ALEKS, possibly Knewton. 
• Their Spotlight on Student Success assignments seemed really good, and I'd like to see some examples of them. 
• Two websites were shared PocketPoints and Flipd. 

My comment on their session evaluation form sums up my current thoughts on how to go about helping students develop their foundational skills;

"I struggle with the tension between requiring students to do tasks that are meant to develop student's foundational skills and activities that allow students to choose how to grow their foundational skills on their own. In my department I have conversations with a colleague about his Taoist approach and my Confucian approach. His stresses providing choice and establishing what the consequences of those choices will be, while I want to lay out the order and structure of what students should do. Really its a question of interval vs. external pressures. "

10:20 AM - Teaching and Learning Practices for Equitable Math Student Success

Ralf Youtz from Portland CC (formerly of Clark College) presented a great session on developing strategies that would help create culturally relevant teaching. Ralf used think pair share to a great effect, and in talking to him later on in the day he mentioned the book Routines for Reasoning: Fostering Mathematical Practices in All Students. I've always been a little worried about using think pair share on faculty, but Ralf's prompts were great and he attributed them partially to this book.

The group around my table centered on reflection as a tool to help center student's experiences. One person (Nancy) used math journals in the past, another (Greg) used math biographies at the start of the class to get a better sense of who the students were, and I shared my post-class quizzes that ask students to reflect on specific questions. A question I'd like to add that I got from this session was "What was difficult about the material today? Why?"

Ralf also focused on collaborative learning and proactive teaching practices. He mentioned specific topics and prompts to help students work in groups as students don't know how to talk about math. Really, its a skill, and one math faculty should be more attentive to. While some may feel these proactive teaching practices are 'hand holding', I have no problem holding my student's hands to help them get to where they are going; connect students to academic resources, if it is important make it mandatory (resonant with my previous session), and early alerts to let students know when they are getting behind.

It is midnight and I've only gotten through 11:10 am of the first day. I might (unlikely) get through the rest of Day 1 tomorrow, and will hopefully post more over the next few days. Before I got here I organized a binder with tabs for each day so I can keep my notes somewhat ordered. I'm going to try summing up my sessions here with the help of those notes, so help me Leibniz. 

Faculty and Data: Threading the needle

Last spring my department did an assessment project to determine if our corequisite support courses (which I am the coordinator of) are effective in helping students learn the course material. My home institution has been running corequisite support courses (Business Mathematics with Support, College Algebra with Support, and College Trigonometry with Support) for more than a year and it seemed like a good time to assess whether these courses were effective. I wrote assessment questions aligned to our course outcomes and asked for faculty feedback, which turned into really interesting and engaging conversations. I also wrote rubrics with granular criteria (53 in total) and asked for faculty feedback, which turned into even more interesting conversations. Faculty in all of the support courses and most of the standard courses included these questions (a feat by itself), and after a day of about two dozen instructors grading the 220 student artifacts we had solid data showing that there was no significant difference in student understanding of the course outcomes.

As a result of this project I was asked to became the Outcomes Assessment Liaison for the Math Department at my home institution. I've also joined the Outcomes Assessment Committee, and it feels like I'm gearing up for another phase of my work. The conversations I had with faculty showed me that I have a lot more to learn about assessment, rubrics, and measuring understanding. Granted I've made decisions about what questions to write to assess outcomes and how to grade them. However seeing how faculty make these decisions for their own courses, and then the effect these decisions have on students makes me wonder whether faculty can (or should) have conversations about the decisions they are making. Why decide on a five point scale versus a ten point? How would different faculty grade the same student work? What are the best practices of math assessments senior faculty have and junior faculty crave?

With these questions the idea of collecting data on questions, rubrics, and course success rates is fairly natural, but like venomous animals, natural doesn't mean safe. Faculty are (rightfully) concerned that this data would be used as a hammer to shape everyone into the mold of the faculty member with the highest course success rates. Note these questions are separate from the expectations of most administors; How can we measure program-level outcomes? How can we show student progress to accreditors? How can we determine the areas in a program that need support? Yes, administrator's questions are absolutely related to faculty decisions, but their focus seems to be on the system as a whole. (I could be wrong in that last point, but being in a service department I don't have students wanting to go into my discipline, and therefore I don't have a lot of control over a specific program.)

Another point to consider is the college's Guided Pathways initiative. Like other community colleges we are undergoing reforms to clarify our pathways, get students onto pathways, keep students on pathways, and to determine whether these pathways are effective. The college created four Guided Pathway Pillars for each of these tasks, and I was (am?) on the pillar tasked with keeping students on the path. In that work I looked at both automated and manual methods for determining students who are 'at-risk' of not being successful in their courses. One dataset that was always asked for was access to the live student grades in our learning management system, Canvas. The idea is that with actual grade data our student services staff could conduct interventions to help students get back on track.

I am not opposed to the idea that student grades could be used to determine how outreach should happen, but that use of grade data needs to be restricted in a very specific way. Granted, administrators can get access to course success rates but live student grades during a term feels like a different beast altogether. If a course had a 50% pass rate half-way through the term and an administrator heard about that, is it out of the realm of possibility that the administrator would consciously or unconsciously apply pressure to that faculty member to increase their pass rate? Sure, lots of hypotheticals and unknowns there, but there very well could be other impacts I'm not thinking of.

This leads me to two thoughts on how we can create an environment of trust among faculty to use data;

1. A memorandum of understanding of how course data is to be used. There needs to be a line between faculty and student services use of the data, with administration accessing the data. Yes, administration needs some data, and that would be outlined in the memo. After the current union negotiations are completed I'm hoping to get facetime with our union president to propose such a document.

2. A faculty learning community where membership means you share your course data with the other faculty members. I really like this idea as it creates and builds community, while taking ownership for what we are doing. Starting from a place of looking at equity data we could address reforms that would have the biggest impact on all students.

Have you tried any of this? What are the successful data projects you have been a part of, or heard about?

It's been HOW long? SBCTC Coreq Workshop and the Quality Improvement Process

It's been a minute and I need to get a few ideas out on 'paper' so you may get a burst of a couple posts today and/or tomorrow.

Went to the SBCTC Corequisite Workshop on Tuesday, November 5th. While there we discussed the current corequisite support courses at various Washington state community colleges. My institution (Clark College) presented data on course outcome attainment rates of our coreq students compared to their standard course colleagues. Overall the data doesn't show a significant difference, but there is room to improve. I don't feel comfortable sharing the data here as we it doesn't really satisfy the conditions for a two-tailed difference of means hypothesis test, but I will say the means are fairly close.

While there one of the presenters Joan Zoellner of the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (a former colleague of mine) shared the article Tools for Improving Corequisite Models: A guide for College Practitioners from the Rand Corporation. The article provides a really interesting model for identifying problems and how to investigate them. My own quick summary based on the article and Joan's presentation:

Identifying the Problem of Practice: Here you are trying to identify an actual problem to address. Simple enough right? Well in practice my team found it fairly difficult to do. These Problems of Practice can range from granular instructional problems (What can I do to get students to graph rational functions and identify their properties?) to systemic problems (How can we get faculty to use data to improve their instruction?) 

Aim: In a traditional experiment this would be the treatment of the experimental group. For most of us (although there seems to be information in the article on how to do this in the) we are not going to separate students into a control and experimental group, as that would be treating some students differently than others.

Measures: What data will be collected to indicate there was an improvement. 

Changes: Possible solutions that would address the problem of practice, based on the measures. 

This is a deceptively simple way of cutting through all our plans, all our potential improvements, all of our great ideas, and getting to the things we really need to focus on; the problem, how we're going to address it, and how we're going to measure success. Too often in education we do a thing, thinking it'll solve our (perceived most of the time) problem, and then never checking in to see whether it worked. We can't keep going on this tailspin, we need some direction.

Framing mistakes as a learning opportunity

In a mathematics class mistakes are really tricky. Many students have a very simple view of mistakes; they are bad and should be avoided. Unfortunately being human beings, we all make mistakes, even in a math class. Even me, at the front of the classroom, I will make mistakes. Hopefully we use these mistakes as learning opportunities, which we can only really do if we stop and reflect on what happened, and how to prevent it from happening again.

I made a mistake last week during one of my class's online quizzes, I made a very simple mistake in the setup of the question. Whenever this happens I am usually alerted by an industrious student, and fix the mistake.

During a previous class I shared a list of questions I had to answer when writing a student recommendation for an internship. One of the questions we discussed was "Does the student ask for help when needed?" In most situations it is preferable for someone to ask questions in order to know what they should do, than it is to have someone perform work they do not know how to complete. The time in detecting these errors, fixing them, and mediating any negative consequences is considerable, not counting money or other resources. No wonder an employer would want an intern (or employee) to ask questions when confused.

So this error cropped up in an online quiz, and we just talked about asking for help when needed. So I naturally asked "How many students will send me a message?", if they really listened to our discussion of this question they would ask for help when needed. Out of 29, 3 students sent me a message asking about this question. Ok, so they didn't hear me, not a big surprise. Whenever I talk about topics that are not math (study skills, organization, soft skills, group work, etc.) students usually tune out.

In class the next day I shared the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter. Long story short, a $350 million probe burned up in the Martian atmosphere because someone did not check the units of a calculation. This definitely go their attention, as it usually does; no one expects literal rocket scientists to make mistakes, let alone really simple ones. After talking about the orbiter I had a few questions for students:

• Was this a preventable mistake?
• Was this a significant mistake?
• Do you think NASA learned from the mistake?
• How many people here have made mistakes in their classwork during the last week?
• How many people learned from those mistakes?
• Are your mistakes preventable?
• Are your mistakes significant?
• Did any of your mistakes cost $350 million?
• Do you have space in this class to make mistakes through unlimited attempts completing homework questions, Quiz corrections, and working with others in class?

We had some real-talk on making mistakes in math, and how they are part of learning the course material. By making it clear that I expect students to make mistakes ("Make them early and often.") and to learn from them I hope to lessen student fear of making mistakes, the stigma associated with them, and to reframe student's expectations of me. I regularly ask students to reflect on making study plans, if they were able to follow their initial study plan, what factors prevented them from following their plan, and what they are going to do in the future to prevent these factors from getting in the way. 

In the future I would like to do a few things with this theme of making mistakes:

• A POGIL-like activity where students read through a description of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and come to some of these conclusions themselves.
• Demonstrate the role reflection plays in learning from mistakes. 
• Tie this into the growth mindset, a very natural place to discuss these issues. 

How do you address mistakes in your classroom? Do you do any specific activities with students to frame mistakes as learning opportunities?