With my inquiry well underway in the Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 classes, I have been trying to incorporate a variation of activities that encourage students to engage in different ways. Some students, as I have observed, thrive in an environment where there is strictly practice based on notes they have taken; other students really struggle to engage in any way with this style of activity. Thus in this lesson to be discussed, the Algebra 2 students were introduced to polynomial functions through a self-guided inquiry using Desmos graphing software. The activity prompted students to observe and describe the shapes and features of polynomial graphs to submit online, where the entire class could access all of the observations. I thought this activity would do a nice job showcasing all students’ thinking and meaning making based on a very open-ended activity.
My Penn Mentor was in class conducting an observation during this class, and her observational notes provided me with some keen insights into how the class was actively (or passively) participating throughout the lesson. As shown in the observation notes, there are several moments throughout the lesson where the number of students on task was noted. The lesson began with our typical routine of an approximately 10 minute warm-up problem and review of the problem; at this point the majority of the class was on task and participating in this problem either individually or collaboratively with their classmates sitting around them in the U-Shape arrangement. Following the review of the process for the warm-up, students were given a few minutes to check over their homework using the provided answers. As my Penn Mentor noted, only about 13/21 students were engaged in this part of the class. While reviewing my mentor’s notes, this observation had me think about alternate ways for homework review that may involve more of the students or make the activity more engaging – perhaps creating some sort of incentive for students who ask questions about the homework from peers or myself. After reviewing some of the problems that were specifically asked about by the students, the class transitioned into the online exploration of polynomials. At the start of the activity, it was noted that the majority of the students appeared to be on task, about 16 out of 21; however, some students were slow to engage but after a few minutes almost all students were noted to be involved in the investigation. As my classroom mentor and I circulated the classroom, I noticed that several groups of students were working together in a very positive way. There seemed to be lots of collaboration between students who not only sat directly next to each other in the U-Shape, but also those in front or behind them. As my Penn Mentor also noted, “U-Shaped seating arrangement allows ST & CM to have adequate room to work with individual students.” I found that this arrangement worked very well for this type of inquiry activity, where students had several questions about the unfamiliar information. This shape promoted and openness to the classroom; there was space for each student to be accessible as an individual, but classmates could work together to understand each stage of the activity and bounce ideas off of each other. After seeing the success of this activity, I was very interested to find out how the students felt about this seating arrangement for other lessons in class. I planned to later ask the students a variety of questions that not only provided a review of the arrangement alone, but also in comparison to previously sitting in groups of four students. These comparisons will help to best inform my conclusions for my line of inquiry.
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As my inquiry progresses, I want to make sure my students have insight in my exploration. I think student voice is such a critical part of learning, so I want to make sure my students are having a positive experience in all of the arrangements I test out; otherwise, I want to make changes that will help my students enhance their learning. After a week of trying out the U-Shape seating arrangement with the Algebra I class, I wanted to check in with the students to see how they felt in their new seats. In order to get a sense of how my students were feeling, I asked the students two additional questions to submit with their warm up. They were as follows: 1. How do you like the U-Shape arrangement? 2. With 1 being “very difficult” and 5 being “very easy,” how easy does this arrangement allow you to a. collaborate with your classmates? b. participate in classwork and discussions? I had the students submit their responses electronically so I could compile them together in a spreadsheet; I also informed them that they should try to be as honest as possible and that it was OK to express any negative feelings for the arrangement. This way, the students could provide me with their true feelings in a very low stakes manner. Before receiving any responses, I decided that if more than half of the class was unhappy with the new arrangement, I would change the seating to groups of three, which was a higher ranked arrangement. I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many students felt that this seating change was very positive for them and their learning; only a few students said that they had neutral or negative feelings sitting in this arrangement. I thought some of the more detailed feedback from the students was also very helpful to see. Several students commented that they found this arrangement to give them more space and allow them to see more of their classmates; however, a downside is that this arrangement limited collaboration to those mostly on their side of the classroom. I found these specific comments would be helpful in guiding my teaching strategies for the remaining time the students are seated this way. If I hope to have students engage with me as the teacher but even more so with each other, I need to provide them with avenues to do so. Several activities the students were tasked with this week prompted the students to brainstorm and work with those seated around them in either collaborative pairs or small groups. I noticed a trend of students working with those immediately next to them, with a few students occasionally turning to include those seated behind them. So far, I feel that collaboration has not decreased in this new arrangement, but it has slightly altered in which students collaborate together. I am very interested to survey the students at the end of the upcoming week to find out more in terms of participation. I plan to keep close track of how each student participates collaboratively and in whole group discussions, and I hope to have each student reflect on their own participation in this seating arrangement. Participation to me will include things like volunteering to explain their problem-solving process or work for a warm-up, participating in class discussions, offering new insights or asking deeper questions, and working closely with classmates to further understanding. I look forward to examining my observations alongside of my students’ reflections. Student Responses to Reflection QuestionsLast week, I discussed the survey that I distributed to my students in order to incorporate student input into my inquiry project. These surveys were distributed to a group of a group of ninth grade Algebra I students as well as tenth and eleventh grade Algebra II students. After receiving responses from both classes, I compiled two spreadsheets so I could analyze the responses better. The spreadsheets can be seen below that show a student’s seating choices in each row and the ranking number given by each column. Algebra I RankingsAlgebra 2 RankingsAs I examined the responses in table form, there were some interesting similarities amongst both groups. First, I noticed how it appeared that many students enjoyed sitting in groups of four as we have been seated for most of the year in the Algebra II class; this seemed to hold true for a large portion of the Algebra I class as well. What I found to be interesting in the Algebra I class was that seating arrangements of groups of three students was the second choice for all but three students who returned their surveys. One speculation I have for this is that those students who enjoy sitting in an arrangement as a group of four will benefit from having as many group members seated with them as possible. Another idea I have for this preference is that students at this high school are becoming accustomed to sitting in small groups with students, so arrangements like a large U-shape in the room or sitting with only one other student may not fit the typical learning environments.
For my inquiry, I am very interested in trying out as many arrangements as possible in order to observe how students collaborate with each other and engage in classroom activities. Knowing that the U-shape arrangement seemed to be a very high or very low choice for most students, I thought this arrangement would be a good first trial. The Algebra I students were the first class to experience this change during this past week. Students entered the classroom and were given instructions to choose whichever seat they believed that they could do their best work in. It was very interesting to observe that many of the female students chose one side of the room while most of the males selected the opposite side of the room. This was likely due to the fact that students decided to sit by their friends, but I plan to dive further into the students’ thought process for choosing their seat through a sociogram this coming week. Although the classroom layout feels a bit abnormal due to the change, I have not received any immediate negative feedback from the students or my classroom mentor; I look forward to diving deeper into the collaboration I see from my students in the next few weeks. I am looking forward to how the Algebra II students take to this layout that seems to be working with the Algebra I students. From my experience, the older group of students has been excited to change up the pace in the classroom, but I am interested to observe their reactions to the environment. Next week, we will be starting a new unit on polynomial functions, which will provide me a great opportunity to observe my students’ engagement with each other and the lessons in this new arrangement. I also think that this group will not shy away from vocalizing and expressing their reactions to these new seats; I plan to collect another short survey to gauge the reactions of the students at the end of next week. Those results will inform my next course of action in terms of lesson design and structure, activity design, and potential ways to enhance the particular U-shape seating. For my inquiry project, I will be observing the collaboration and participation that occurs in class while my students are seated in various arrangements. Because my current student teaching position is in a school that emphasizes student collaboration in learning, I hope that this exploration will shed some light on best ways to encourage collaboration and participation by students in ways that make them most comfortable. In order to implement any changes to the physical arrangement of my classroom, I wanted to establish a sense of what my students are feeling about themselves as a learner, how they would like the classroom to be arranged, and what they believe good student participation looks. As a warm-up this week, students were asked to complete the following survey to share their opinions: As I reviewed the responses from my Algebra 2 class of tenth and eleventh graders, there were some patterns that I somewhat expected but also a few things that I did not expect to see. In terms of student learning style, I received the majority of responses with visual and hands-on learning in the top two spots with auditory learning ranked third. This response was not much of a surprise to me, and based on the explanations I can understand why the students felt that auditory was their last choice. Most students noted that with visual or hands-on learning, they are able to see the process at work and experiment with it on their own. I found that my response to this question would be the same as a student. I enjoy seeing examples of how something is done as well as some hands-on manipulation in order to see it at work if possible. This is very informative for my practice for the rest of this year and for future groups of students. While this pattern will not always hold true, I now know for the rest of the year to give my students more visual and exploratory learning opportunities in order to promote their success. The next two questions asked students about their ideal classroom layout and to rank a list of possible arrangements from their favorite to their least favorite. There was definitely a large range of responses, but something that stood out as somewhat as a surprise to me was that a few students were actually advocates for an arrangement of individual seats in rows. This really surprised me coming from students who actively applied to a school that emphasizes collaborations in all classrooms. I always thought that students would want to sit with a partner or in groups, so it was very interesting to see those who preferred independent, individual learning instead. While these responses for individual seats in rows existed, there were also quite a few responses that stated “anything but rows.” This was more of the response I had expected from my students, as well as the opinion of my classroom mentor when I asked her to weigh in on the seating arrangement in the classroom. I plan to synthesize the students’ ranking of seating arrangements as best as I can in order to dive further into my exploration. I think the question that I was most interested to see the responses for was “what does good participation by a student look like?” I wanted to ask my students this question at the beginning of my inquiry in order to provide myself with some type of baseline to see how my students either participate or not in a way that they define participation. I consider defining participation for myself in this inquiry and based my observations on this one idea that I had, but I realized that not all students would be able to meet that one standard. By having students create their own definition, I can monitor their involvement in class on a more individualized level. It was interesting to read how some students defined good participation in a way that they act or in some cases do not act in class. I am also very interested to see if this survey has any influence on the way students participate in the future. In the final two pages of the survey, students were given four different options of seating arrangements. They were asked to place an X in the square to represent the desk that they would most like to sit in. I did not see any real observable pattern to the placement of students. Several seemed to select seats either in the back of the classroom or up in the front row. There were some that selected seats in the center of the classroom, but there was definitely a wide variety of responses to this question. I am hoping to also synthesize this data in a way that can inform the way students are individually seated in the various arrangements. Student #1Student #2Student #3This past Thursday, I implemented a process of tracking my students’ participation in the classroom, which I will continue using this year. I asked the SAT (Student Assistant Teacher) to keep a running tally of the number of times each student spoke in a discussion or offered up a solution in the class review day. Students were given opportunities to participate by providing one of four solutions to the warm-up problems for the day, during a whole class discussion of quadratic function transformations, and when working through a review quiz by sharing out solutions.
The class SAT initially kept track of which students spoke by placing a simple tally mark next to each student’s name on a printed class roster; I was pleasantly surprised to see that all but a few members of the class participated in some way during our quiz review class. On a day that served as a review for the quiz that would follow the next day, I hoped that all students would participate in some way to help me get a sense of how prepared the students would be. It was reassuring to see that most students who did participate spoke on more than one occasion; however, I was hoping that there would be participation from all students at least once. After looking over the rostered tally, I decided to convert this into a seating chart for the classroom to see if there is any sort of pattern relating the position of students to who participated. Upon analyzing, there appeared to be at least one student from each table who participated in the discussion and lesson. I could not see a noticeable pattern of position within the classroom to the number of times the student spoke. I initially believed in the idea that the front and along the center of the classroom tends to participate more, but this was not necessarily the case here. It was very interesting to observe more of the absence of a pattern with student participation. When matching the student name to the amount of tally marks, it did seem that the more social students had a large presence in the conversation; this leads me to think more about how I can engage the more introverted students in whole group conversations. I feel that every student in my classroom has valuable pieces of information to contribute to the collective’s learning, so I would really like to find a way to bring all voices to discussions. I want to begin placing a larger focus on the way I question my students, so I wonder if that will have an impact on these students who seem to have a lot more internal dialogue about the concepts covered in class. |
Author20 something year old. Pittsburgh native. Pennsylvania explorer. Graduate student. Aspiring teacher. Archives
March 2016
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