Partner Round Up: A Revisit

I will never stop obsessing over how easy it is to take a "worksheet" and turn it into an interactive partner activity that is rich in practice and mathematical discourse. Truly, the magic of what I call "Partner Round Up" just never seems to dim in its ability to impact student learning and increase engagement. 

I've posted about this activity before at the junior high level but wanted to share an update in a high school setting. I had the opportunity to try this out with a new content during a coaching cycle with one of our College Algebra teachers. She was working on transformations of parent functions and wanting students to recognize that the patterns of transformations were consistent with many different parent functions. 

We created about 20 cards (with repetition) with parent functions like this:

And then another set of 20 cards with transformations represented in a few different ways:

Students pair up so that a person with a parent function card works with a person with a transformation card. I like to color code them, so we all know what's going on.

Students had a worksheet to keep track of everything where they were asked to graph the new function and write the correction equation after the transformation. 

The real beauty is that after each partnership is done transforming their parent function, they switch cards and find a new partner. So, if a student just graphed a square root function, they would graph another square root function with new transformations and get to be the "expert" with that function. If a student just shifted a function down and applied a vertical stretch, they get to do that exact same thing with a new function. The back-to-back repetition without getting boring is... chef's kiss. Just perfection. 

There were a few partnerships that got a little wonky in the best way, especially with rational functions. Those conversations that start out with "is this one possible?" are gold and totally worth including just for the intentional cognitive struggle.

 

Our job as teachers? We facilitate. We walk around spot checking answers and answering questions. Every so often we may shout "We've got a parent function looking for a transformation partner!" to help the partnerships move along. But mostly we "ohhh" and "ahhh" and listen to students share connections with each other. We may provide a little "Oh, that's interesting! Now why is that?" and then walk along, allowing time and space for students to think and process.

It's just the best day. 

I Have Who Has: Let's Talk!

I am always looking for ways to intentionally engage with vocabulary. One of my favorite strategies to get students speaking and thinking is an activity called I Have Who Has. Each student gets a card (see the example below). The teacher starts with the start card and reads it aloud. The student who has the answer to that question responds by reading their card and asking the next question. The game continues in this way until the end card. 

Things I love: 

1. Every single student speaks out loud. How often does every student get a chance to speak whole group in your room?
2. Students have to really focus and listen to the definitions as they are being read. Speaking and listening are two language domains that can easily be overshadowed by reading and writing but are equally as important in language development! 
3. Students are somewhat forced to engage because if they check out or stop listening they become the weakest link in the chain.

It is important to acknowledge that ELL students may be super overwhelmed to read out loud whole group but that doesn't mean they shouldn't get the opportunity. A little pre-teaching or scaffolding may be needed. Set them up for success!

As part of my work as a high school learning coach (instructional coach) I was fortunate enough to work with an AP Human Geography teacher who was looking for more ways to purposefully plan and engage with vocabulary. We created a deck of I Have Who Has cards for all of her 7 units for the year and placed visual cues or hints on the back of each one.

In addition to doing the whole group read through of the cards, we also had students work in small groups to race to make a chain of cards (like dominos). The discussions, arguments, and excitement as students worked together to define the words and find the matches was loud and super engaging. 

Another goal of the teacher I worked with was to implement ways for students to think about the connections between the vocabulary words within a unit and between units. To do this, we handed small groups a mixed up set of cards from multiple units. We told students not to worry about the I Have Who Has part, and instead just focus on the I Have term. Students were instructed to write a complete, content related sentence using as many of the cards as possible, with at least 2 terms for different units. 

The time and effort required to make the cards may seem laborious, but once the cards are made there are so many ways to use them in your classroom to purposefully engage with vocabulary!

Two Truths and A Lie

1. I lived on Kodiak Island in Alaska for a few years.

2. I am one of 6 children.

3. I am not a huge fan of horses.

Two of the statements above are true and one is a lie... can you guess which one?

I think we have all been somewhere and used this strategy as an ice breaker or get to know you game. When talking about myself I actually dread this activity because I never know what to say. My lies are usually way too outlandish, and I don't have many deceptive truths about myself. If you guessed #2, you are correct. I am one of 4 children. Horses are not my jam. And my father was stationed on Kodiak Island for a few years when he was a pilot in the Coast Guard.

As much as I don't love this game outside of the classroom, I LOVE it in the classroom with students. It's a fantastic protocol for so many different content areas. Here's two ideas!

Language Arts Example:

Have students read a piece of text. From the text, have students write two true statements and one false statement. Share whole group or switch papers between small groups and have students figure out which statement is the lie. I love this as a way for students to engage with the same piece of text multiple times. Each new set of three statements creates a new purpose for reading. Students continually have to reference the text to check or dispute a statement.

Here’s an example of my three statements from this text:

Math Example:

Give each group 3 problems to solve and tell them to solve 2 correctly and 1 incorrectly on purpose. They definitely need to show all their work during this activity! Share whole group or switch papers between small groups and identify which one is solved incorrectly. I love this as a way to reinforce the process of showing work and creating conversations around common misconceptions and errors!

As an exit ticket, you could give an example set you create and have students independently identify which one is solved incorrectly and why and justify their reasoning. This is a great way to hit on the math practice standard “critique the reasoning of others”. Here is an example of how this could look.

Which one is solved incorrectly?

A Little Competition to Increase Participation

 There's a very blurred line between student engagement, participation, and compliance. You start down that rabbit hole and you quickly find that true student engagement is a tough thing to achieve. But somedays, and I hope I am not alone in this, you'd just be happy with whole class participation! Not every day is a student engagement masterpiece lesson, and that's okay! When I start to notice that students are a little down, a little tired, and a little too interested in their cell phones than normal, I like to throw in some fun ways to get kids motivated to participate through a little healthy competition! 

Now, before we talk about two of my favorite easy strategies, I have to first say that I am not a huge fan of games in the classroom that only reward the "smartest" kids who are the fastest at answering. Being a strong mathematician is about more than being fast, especially when content is newer. When the fastest and smartest are the only ones rewarded, I actually find that games can make more students check out then check in. Why participate if Sally is just going to win every time? We all have a Sally. We know who she is. And bless her, as teachers we do love Sally. I was Sally. 

MATHLOVE

I first saw this game at a CPM conference in San Francisco back a few years ago and was wildly confused until I finally tried it in my classroom and saw the simplistic beauty of it. Take a collection of problems you want students to practice solving. You know those days where you just need them to practice a skill and really hammer it home before you can dive into some of the deeper contextual connections that will truly promote student engagement? Yes, those days. 

Have students sit with a partner. They are going to be competing against this partner. 

Each student needs to fill out a MATHLOVE board. Here is my very not fancy version made in a table in Google Docs: 

Direct students to put four 3's, four 2's, four 1's, and four 0's anywhere on their board. When its finished it should look something like this: 

Okay now here is the fun part! Put a problem up on the board or direct students to complete a problem on a worksheet. Everyone works independently on the problem. When students have the answer they circle it on their paper. The circled answer is their final answer. Reveal the answer and have partners check each other to see if they got it correct. 

If they got it wrong, they get 0 points. If they got it correct, they have the opportunity to earn points. How many points? Here is how points are awarded after each problem. 

Create two cups and cut up the letters M-A-T-H in one cup and L-O-V-E in another cup. 

Draw a letter from each cup. Loudly, with lots of gusto and zest, announce the letters chosen. Students, once they know what's going on, will be holding their breath in anticipation. 

"M and V" you announce. The crowd explodes with noise. Chaos breaks out. I love it. Students check their board, and whatever number is at the intersection of the two letters is the number of points they earn for that problem. Students keep track of their points and the "winner" is whatever partner has the most points. 

Things to mention:

1. Some students will get the right answer and still get zero points, leveling the playing field a little for Sally who gets every single one right. Calm down, Sally. She will be very upset about this but that's the game. Her partner, on the other hand, will feel like he still has a chance.

2. Everyone is working on the same problem right now, together, and there is a time limit to get going. There is a sense of urgency to tune in, get started, and start working to get it done in time. 

3. If you throw each problem up one at a time students can't work ahead. I actually love this. Sally would do all of them in 5 minutes. This way as you go over the answer or address whole class misconceptions, everyone is hopefully more tuned in. 

4. It could not possibly be more low prep. Get some problems. Copy a very not fancy table. One you make the cups you can reuse them. It's great on days you need something but don't have time to create, laminate, cut, etc. 

5. Heads up... the first time you try this students will treat the board like a Bingo board and try to cross the numbers off. You could draw A & V multiple times over the course of a game so every single square stays in play the entire time. It's a one time issue and they figure it out pretty quick. 

NUMBER LOTTERY

Want to win the lottery?! Okay not really… And if lotteries or gambling is going to get you a parent email on this one maybe just change the name.

I 100% snagged this idea from a coworker. A win for one of us is a win for all, am I right? Students work in pairs and have a set number of problems to complete (I usually do about 10). Each right answer earns them a lottery number. You'll have to make sure you have enough lottery numbers for every group to claim however many they need. 

After they get a problem or two finished, they check their answers with me for approval and then go up and claim their lottery numbers by writing their initials on the whiteboard. I just ran around the room like a mad woman checking answers and addressing misconceptions with students. I love days where I get to connect one on one or two on one with everyone in the room.

At the end of the period I pulled up a random number generator and selected 10 numbers. Winners for each number got candy and everyone got great practice in for the day. Engagement? Debatable. Depends on the student and the content. But whole class participation and valuable practice time? You bet. 

New Year & New Educational Tools

I have an Amazon Prime Day addiction. Every summer the anticipation of Prime Day gets me giddy just thinking about stocking up on all my favorite school supplies for August! This year, I went a little more nuts than normal since I had a small surplus of money in my teacher account from having a student teacher a few years ago. Let the games begin... 

I bought a ton of things, but hands down my favorite new addition to my classroom are these dry erase pockets. I don't understand how I have gone 8 years of teaching with out these! I have utilized these about 5 times in the last 2 weeks of school. GAME CHANGER.

Check out some of these awesome ways we've been using these dry erase pockets below!

For sorting shapes on Venn Diagram mats:

For discovering patterns: 

For playing Matho Bingo:

And now finally I have solved two of my biggest issues with stations/problem loops/scavenger hunts/etc. First, they can be so hard to see sometimes in a crowded classroom but now they are huge and the colored borders really stand out! Secondly, students would always write on them and give away hints or answers to the next group. I want them to mark them up (hello... problem solving!!), but with pens or even pencil sometimes it would be too hard to erase. Now they can mark it up all they want and just erase it before they leave. 

You can find the exact ones I purchased HERE!!

These are easily my favorite new addition to the school year! Welcome back, teacher community!

Instant Feedback for Instant Learning

Something I have always believed in is the need for every student to get some kind of feedback about their work every day. My worst case scenario would be that students come in to class and work for 45 minutes on an activity or a project and leave, never knowing if they did any of the problems right or if they could have improved their work either in organization, efficiency, etc. Providing students with feedback can be tedious, especially if that feedback is hand written notes from me on homework or an assessment. One hundred and twenty tests take a long time to grade, let alone give personal feedback on. Finding opportunities to easily and authentically build feedback into the day's lesson has become a mission of mine this year. I never, ever want a student to do 20 quadratic formula problems incorrectly before they find out they are all wrong. And now, heaven forbid, they just solidified a misconception 20 times. 

One of my favorite strategies to provide feedback quickly is matching answer partner worksheets. For this one, students pair up and choose who will be Partner A and Partner B. For each problem, the partners have the same quadratic function but are each tasked with solving it in a different way. One partner does Quadratic Formula, and the other partner factors. Obviously, they should get the same answer. 

I have done this before where each partner has a different problem entirely (like two different multi-step equations) but their answers will be the same. Students cannot move on until their partner is finished and they have agreed upon the answer. This also allows for some awesome peer collaboration to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it to make the answers match. 

I told the girls to act like they were agreeing upon the answer. This is what I got. High schoolers crack me up. I am really enjoying this age. While there are still days I miss my middle school students, I definitely feel like the opportunity to come up to the high school has forced me to grow so much! 

The thing I love most about activities like this is that in the first five minutes student knew whether or not they were on the right track. As they were working, they were provided with instant feedback about the accuracy of their answer and immediately able to go back and correct mistakes or misconceptions. 

For this specific topic, students were also able to compare which partner had the easier solving strategy and as a class we had conversations about when factoring was faster or when the quadratic formula was faster. 

Instant feedback. What do you do on a regular basis to ensure that each student gets feedback every day? What other content ideas could you see being used for an activity like this? Do students ever leave your class and have no idea whether or not they actually understood what was going on? How can you fix that? 

When The Pieces Come Together

One of the biggest differences between teaching middle school and teaching high school is getting the students to talk to each other. In the 8th grade, I felt like I was constantly telling kids to "be quiet" or "pay attention" or "turn around and look at me please" or "seriously stop poking him and listen for just 5 minutes". But if I could channel all that energy and desire to be social in the right direction, class discussions and student to student communication seemed to almost happen naturally.  Students LOVED talking. And all I had to do was make sure they were talking about what I wanted them to. 

In the 11th grade, it couldn't be more opposite. I feel like I am standing in a room full of lethargic zombies some days just begging anyone to mutter a word or even think about turning toward a neighbor to engage with them. This has really forced me to get creative in my lesson planning, to make sure that I am living up to my daily goal of allowing every student an opportunity to speak every day. But if they aren't motivated to speak, or engaged in the lesson enough to WANT to contribute, they won't. Challenge accepted. 

 

I have heard about "classroom jigsaws" at just about every training I have gone to the past few years, but for some reason I have avoided trying it. It just seemed like I could never think about a topic in my curriculum that it would REALLY work for students, and not just be a way for me to check the box to say I have done one. 

Until I started reviewing how to solve quadratic equations. Oh man, they needed some extra practice and I realized that part of the confusion was how many different ways you could solve for x in a quadratic equation but still get the same answer. So, I decided to try a jigsaw. Each problem could be solved by factoring, quadratic formula, or completing the square. I wanted students to not only know how to use each solving strategy, but also be able to decide when one strategy would be better than another and under what conditions. So here was the set up:

It went INCREDIBLE. I loved listening to the students discussing in their groups how to solve each problem. Many students had been a little lost or absent and so when they got to the factoring group they quickly realized they didn't know how to factor that particular problem. But the pressure of knowing that in just 5 minutes time they would have to go back to their original group and teach their group members was enough to really motivate them to find someone else who was in the factoring group and figure it out. The room was SO LOUD. I loved it. Everyone was talking, sharing ideas, showing each other short cuts and tips, and completely engaged in what was going on. 

I loved how when they went back to their original group all 3 group members had the same answer already, so the conversation was less about "getting the right answer" and more about how to manipulate the equation and solve it using the different strategies.

The student worksheet was super easy to make. You can find my copy here. I purposefully planned different equations that would highlight different solving hurdles, so that they would having something to discuss in regards to which strategy was the "best". 

What other mathematics content can you think of that would allow for a jigsaw to actually enhance student learning and increase student communication and collaboration?