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. 

Worksheet in Disguise: Card Sort

I love card sort days. I love days where students do math with out writing anything down, except for the things they want or need to write down. I love days when you can be wrong and there is no need to erase, grab more paper, or start over. I love days when my laziest kid ends up doing just as much work as my overachiever... and doesn't even know it! TRICKED YA!

I know I am not the only person who feels like students need practice, and lots of it, to solidify a new skill or concept. There's a whole world of research (some good, some not, some contradictory) that discusses at length how many times, and for how long, and for how frequent students need to revisit skills to really retain that information. But handing out worksheet after worksheet seems like a rather boring and socially isolating option. Here is my first way to disguise the worksheet and create an activity that is not only more engaging but also allows for more connections, more communication, and more organized chaos! 

SWBAT: Students will be able to calculate the measures of interior angles, the measures of exterior angles, or the number of sides of polygons given any one of the other pieces of information.

First I created a table and filled in all the answers. It looked like this: 

Then I took away 3 out of the 4 numbers in each row, leaving just one piece of information given. I made sure to rotate the given information so that it allowed for different starting places each time: 

Then, I copied the completed table on colored paper and the empty table on white paper. The colored table got cut up into little cards and put in envelopes, one for each pair of students in my class. Shout out to my awesome TA's who are always so willing to cut paper for me! 

Students then spent the ENTIRE fifty two minute period sorting the cards onto the table. The beautiful thing is that each blank in the table represents a question that could have easily been on a worksheet. This means that this card sort is like a 30 problem worksheet, but in this method students have a lot of flexibility for how they choose to sort the cards. They can rely on connections between the measurements they feel confident about and be pushed and pressed into developing connections they are still working on. Some of the rows were especially challenging since we have never explicitly talked about how to work "backwards" to find the side length or sum when given an interior angle. 

The best part for me is the talking. Partners are talking. A lot. They are teaching each other, challenging each other, arguing with each other, justifying their thinking to each other, and using each other as a resource for knowledge. Its beautiful. 

When kids are done they put the little cards back in the envelope and leave the empty mat on their desks. No writing required (but let's be real... there's a lot of scratch work & scribbling going on). You will also notice that students had their notebooks out with them with our notes from yesterday. I also allowed some students to fill in a blank table (with writing, not cards) if they wanted to add it to their notebooks after the activity was over, but it wasn't required. The notes looked like this (doesn't Ashley have the best note taking skills EVER!?): 

Thirty problems in fifty two minutes with no whining, complaining or groaning? I'll take it any day!

Quizizz: Everything I Wish Kahoot! Was

When I first heard about Kahoot I went into full on obsession mode and found reasons to use Kahoot as much as I possibly could. It was awesome. Kids thought it was awesome. And the novelty of the activity had my students engaged...

...for a few weeks. And then, like most things, it got old quick. It probably didn't help that all the teachers in my building had heard about Kahoot! (mainly from me not shutting up about it) and for a few weeks students were subjected to the fast past multiple choice game multiple times a day. I still think Kahoot! has it's place and time in the classroom, but recently I have been researching lots of different websites that work similarly to Kahoot! trying to find the best out there! 

The first one I tried is a website called Quizzizz. 

Quizzizz promotes itself as "free self paced quizzes to review, assess and engage -in class and at home". 

Here are a few things I liked about Quizzizz:

1. Log in with Google. There is nothing worse than having to create a new log in with a new password to write down on a sticky note that I will surely lose. I don't do well with passwords. It's my Achilles heel of classroom organization. 

2. Search public quizzes. I even found a wide assortment of quizzes that connect to the curriculum that our district uses. That's neat! 

3. Live vs Homework. You can start a quiz live for the classroom setting or you can open a window for students to be able to complete the quiz at home. My students have a lot of absences. It sort of just comes with the territory in a low SES school. The homework option is fantastic for students who miss class or want to take it again at home. 

4. Pull Individual Questions. You can start making your own quiz and then just pull individual question from public quizzes. So helpful! In Kahoot!, sometimes I don't want to duplicate an ENTIRE quiz and then have to edit what I want and don't want, and so having the ability to just copy questions over is very flexible. 

5. Self paced. This was HUGE for me. For my students who work a little slower or need more time to get started on each question, Kahoot! is pointless. They quickly give up when they realize that they aren't going to be able to work fast enough to answer. But with Quizzizz students can go as fast or as slow as they want. You can even put up this live feed of how each group is doing, showing progress and accuracy. My students liked the live feed and the desire to not get red chunks in their progress bar was pretty motivating. We have created a pretty solid class culture where we don't fear mistakes or feel embarrassed by making them, so I wasn't worried about publicly displaying this live feed. I think it's important that that kind of culture is there before you post up the live feed. 

6. Immediate feedback. As soon as the student answers a question in Quizzizz it lets them know whether or not they got the answer right. Kahoot! also let's them know but for some reason the instant feedback seemed to be more beneficial in this platform. 

7. Reports. The reports section was awesome. I can go back days later and pull up the report from the quiz. They are easily organized and made entering grades from this quiz super fast and efficient. 

8. Mastery. I had a few students finish the self paced quiz (I had them complete it in partners) and then go back and play again, wanting to get a better score. Once the quiz is live, students can go take it as many times as they want. They just re enter their names and go through the questions again. I had the settings set so that every student's questions were shuffled and even the answer choices were shuffled so that they couldn't just go back and hit "B" instead of "C". I liked the ability for students to try again, especially since this was just a quick formative assessment that was mostly for students to know where they were at, and for me to quickly evaluate who was really struggling. 

9. Answers on Student Device. I have almost 40 students in every class and due to limited space, many students sit far from the board. In Kahoot!, student devices only show colors and symbols, and they have to look up to the board to see the answer choices. There are always complaints about students not being able to see the board or choosing the wrong answer because they couldn't see the answer choices. With Quizzizz, the answer choices also show up on the student device. Hallelujah! 

10. Quick and Easy Formative Assessment. Overall I really liked Quizzizz and will use it again. Grading takes a lot of time, and the ability to immediately know where a student is at in their understanding is rare, and nearly impossible in a class of forty students. This, although it has it's flaws and isn't a perfect assessment measure, is a very quick and easy way to get a decent gauge for where your students are at. 

Have you tried Quizzizz? Is there another platform I should try? 

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? 

Partner Round Up

Howdy Partner! On Friday we did one of my favorite classroom activities... Partner Round Up! Yeehaw! This strategy is one of the best ways I know to really encourage (force) kids to work together and learn from one another. If you or your school is part of the AVID program, this is a great one to use to show how you use "Collaboration" as a WICOR strategy. This isn't just partner work, this is about learning from and with others.

The idea is simple. Each kid gets a card. Sometimes the whole class has the same type of card and, depending on the content, sometimes half the class gets one type of card and the other half gets a different type. Students pair up, solve the problem, and move on to another partner. That's it! 

Let's run through some specifics. Friday we did Partner Round Up with graphing linear equations. Half the class got a card that had a slope written on it and the other half got a card with a y-intercept on it. A slope person must meet with a y-intercept person. Together they graph the linear equation and write the equation in slope intercept form. Then, and this is the important part, they trade cards. Otherwise one student would have the same card the entire time. This way, they only technically work with the same card twice and they should be an expert at this particular slope or y-intercept after already thinking about it with their last partner. After trading cards they find a new partner.

The students I have this year are wildly entertaining. They don't lack personality, that's for sure. Usually I just have students sort of wander around until they find a partner, but this year the students suggested we make one spot of the room for "single people". When you are "single", you can go here to "mingle". Clever. It stuck. Students were much faster at partnering up and getting through as many partnerships as possible. On average, students completed about 10 partnerships in the 20-30 minutes we had for this activity. 

WHY I LOVE THIS ACTIVITY:
1. I don't teach pretty much the whole day. I facilitate. And I think that at times this can be a very powerful position to be in. The students are doing the talking, thinking, working, and at times teaching. I walk around the room monitoring behavior and answering questions when they arise. But for the most part, I just get to watch my students be mathematicians.

2. Students teach other. On Friday I heard one student say to another "When I was partners with Gavin he explained it like this and it really helped me".

3. It encourages (forces) ELL students to work and talk with many other students in the class. They get to hear lots of academic language from their peers. You can start to see how after working with a few partners, ELL students gain confidence and begin to take the lead role at the partnerships that follow.

4. Repetition is key and this activity is so fun and engaging that it sort of tricks students into doing many math problems that would normally be somewhat mundane in worksheet form.

5. Students get to move. They are up out of their seat non-stop and getting to move about the room. Even  my most hyper-active students are able to stay on task for an extended amount of time due to the constant change in movement and partners.

IDEAS FOR THE CARDS:

Here are a few ideas I have gathered for various types of contents that would work great for this activity: 

What other ideas do you have? How could you adapt your lesson to fit this strategy? Can't wait to hear your ideas!