Diversity and Differentiation

If you walked into my classroom you would not think it was very diverse. Out of 31 students (ours numbers are dropping), we have only one mixed student and two twin Hispanic students. Beside this our students can pretty easily be categorized into athletes and quiet students. The majority of students in my class are involved in some time of athletic group or band. These students are usually very energetic and chat with each other all of the time. The students who are not into sports are my "quiet students." They consist of about 20% of the class. Because of the this, often my quiet students fade in the background.

I have tried to break the students up into groups of varied ability level. This is somewhat difficult because since our class is small and we sit so close together, I also have to make sure that many of my students are not seated anywhere near each other. To make sure that my "quiet students" are not left out, I try to include a student in their group who will ensure that they won't be overshadowed by the more chatty students.

Technology and Action Research

The technology we use in our classroom includes a Promethean board and graphing calculators. The Promethean is great because I can have the essential ideas I want my students to learn already in a presentation. This allows me to walk around and observe my students instead of constantly having to be writing on the board. Also, because my handwriting isn't the greatest, it is great to be able to have pre-written problems that the students can easily read. We have 20 graphing calculators for our class. Thankfully, enough students have their own calculators that we don't have to share calculators. Most of the time, these calculators are used for simple operations especially when we are learning concepts that don't involve graphing. It is kind of sad the types of things my students put in their calculators because of the things they can't do mentally. However, we would not be able to learn the things we are supposed to learn if we did not have these calculators because the students wouldn't be able to get past simple operations. We have a set of clickers (not enough for one per student) but we have not used them yet. Next semester when I have a smaller class, I hope to use them.

For my action research, I plan to look at how does assessing homework in a variety of ways affect test scores and overall student opinion. So far, I plan to assess homework in the following ways: daily completion grades, daily graded for accuracy, graded for accuracy by chapter, and homework quizzes. I want to know how assessing homework affects study habits and retaining knowledge of mathematical concepts.

Parental Involvement

Parental involvement is pretty mixed for the students in my class. We do have a few overbearing parents that are constantly checking their student’s grades and emailing us about every grade that is not a 100%. The irritating thing about this is that they email us before asking their student about their grade. However, most of the parents do ask what needs to happen to be able to raise their student’s grade, not expecting us to “go easy” on them. The biggest issue is that parents do not seem to keep their children accountable to turn in homework or come to extra help sessions.

For example, we have one student in our class who missed about a week of school for medical-related issues. When she returned, she was constantly falling asleep in class (because of the same medical issue) and was very behind in turning in work and making up tests. We met with her mother and two other academic teachers and an assistant principal. Her mother explained the details of her medical issues which we knew most of. We explained what she needed to do to make up for her missed time, offering many times she could come in for extra help. Her mother promised she would make sure her daughter would come to every time possible (also for her other classes) and would make up all her missing assignments and tests. We only had a week before fall break and she rarely came in for extra help or when she did it was ten minutes before class started. We updated her mother on her behavior and yet there was no change or replied emails. It is kind of frustrating because her mother talked about how much effort they were going to put into her making up everything and we didn’t see any effort besides her coming to a meeting.

Besides these specific parents most of our students’ parents are moderately involved as far as we can tell. 

Assessments

At Maryville, it seems like the math department has decided that the students’ grades come from small homework assignments, 2 quizzes, and one test for each chapter. I don’t know if all math teachers assess in this specific way but as far as I’ve seen that is basically the rule. I know some teachers do not grade homework but instead have homework quizzes or some combination of taking up homework and homework quizzes. I haven’t seen many different ways for assessments. In our class, homework is used more as practice and as a way to boost grades (if the students actually do it). We accept the homework as a packet on quiz days. Its purpose is not to assess; however, we do receive some ideas for formative assessment when we answer homework questions. The quizzes serve as formative assessments because it allows us to see what they are struggling with before we reach the end of the chapter. Our chapter tests serve as a summative assessment for each chapter. They also have a midterm and a final.

One issue that seems to come up is when students make small errors on their tests or quizzes that cause them to receive a bad grade. We have one student who for the first two chapters did not seem to understand a lot of what we did, did not turn in his homework, and failed the quizzes and tests. He was failing the class with a low 60. I don’t know if he realized he needed to step up or if his parents took action but he started working very hard over the next two chapters. He asked a lot of questions when he didn’t understand, he had most of his homework completed, and he was coming in early for extra help. It was clear that he still was struggling a little but he was definitely a lot better off than the beginning of the semester. In one section, he was thriving when a lot of his peers did not understand. However, when it came time to take the test he made so many small errors that caused him to fail the test. We gave him a lot of partial credit because it was clear that he knew a lot of the material, but all of his small errors still added up.

It’s hard in these situations because he is definitely improving but he is still making enough errors that his grade will not be raised high enough for him to pass. He still has a chance to raise his grade by the end of the semester but it is disheartening that his hard work is not reflected in his grade. Thankfully next week during fall break they have remediation days that will give him a chance to improve his grade.

I think that next semester, I may change the way we accept homework. I like the idea of letting students get a chance to ask questions over the homework they don’t understand but I want to take up homework more regularly to keep the students more accountable and to use it more as a formative assessment.

Class Community

The environment of my classroom is relatively positive and productive. The students are pretty comfortable with each other and have no issue speaking out in class. They participate pretty well though sometimes they need more prompting. The students are comfortable working together in whatever group they are placed in. There are very few behavioral issues and when we do have some they are very minor and easy to manage. We have 33 students in a very small room so we are all very close to each other which creates an intimate atmosphere. Half of my students are pretty motivated to making good grades by finishing their work and doing well on tests. The other half basically just wants a passing grade to move on to the next class. There are no stories that stand out to me about my class but they are pretty typical teenagers.

Motivation

I think that expectations play a huge role in a student’s motivation. If a teacher’s expectations are high for a student than he is more likely to push himself to meet those expectations; however, if expectations are low, than a student does not feel the need to challenge himself. In one class, I kept encouraging one student to turn in her missing homework. I explained to her that I knew she could be successful in this class and doing and turning in homework is an important part of the class. I kept reminding her for a couple days in a row. On Friday, she came up to me with a big smile on her face and presented me a stack of homework that was missing. I told her how excited I was that she turned it in and I could tell she felt proud of herself for living up to expectations.

On the other hand, my mentor teacher teaches a “Bridge Math” class. This is basically the lowest class that seniors can take. The expectations for the class are very low and seniors whose only goal is to graduate can easily pass. It is obvious that many of the students could easily be in a more strenuous class but their past math class habits have kept their grades low enough to put them in this class. Most of the seniors completely goof off and just do enough work to get by. It is clear that because the expectations for the class are so obviously low many of the students in the class have little motivation to actually try.

Tricky Quiz

On Friday, we gave the students a quiz over solving systems of linear equations and inequalities by graphing, substitution, and elimination. It seemed as though half the class was confident using substitution and elimination while the other half was still struggling somewhat. However, graphing seemed to be the easiest because we have been graphing practically since the beginning of the semester and they have been graphing even before then. On quiz day, we reviewed, touching on most topics but especially substitution and elimination because that was what the majority was struggling with. We handed out the quizzes and all but one student did not finish before class ended. They turned in their quizzes and we decided to finish them on Monday. We looked through their unfinished quizzes to see what they were struggling with the most. Surprisingly, their graphing both systems of linear equations and inequalities seemed to be the biggest problem. Their graphs were everywhere. There was one problem that involved fractions that most of the students had skipped or gave a very strange graph.
It really shocked us that they were mostly able to answer the problems involving substitution and elimination (there were still some students who did not get it) and instead had problems with graphing. We did not expect them to be stumped by these problems. Because of this quiz, we see that we need to review and practice different methods of graphing and probably need to make sure they know how to check their graphs in their calculators. I discovered it is very difficult to measure if they know the concepts we are trying to test them on when they are struggling with a basic concept that is part of the foundation of the material.