Algebra professional development

As an Algebra 1 teacher, I participate in “The Algebra Project,” which is professional development for all algebra teachers in our school district.  I have now attended two of these all day training sessions.  The first training session focused on mathematical conversation and looked ahead at how we could teach an upcoming chapter.  I was introduced to the mathematician’s dyad, and we modeled and practiced it with different variations.  I now recognize the difference between “turn and talk” and facilitating a dyad is the chance for every student to talk.  In “turn and talk,” one student can dominate the conversation.  In the dyad, each student has an equal opportunity to talk, and each student has an equal responsibility to listen and be ready to report out.  As a result of this training, I have made the dyad part of our class procedures.  My students do like the dyad.  It has been excellent for formative assessment, student engagement and breaking up lessons into smaller chunks.   I like it because I get to catch these misunderstanding much earlier during the period.  Before, I’d have to wait until the exit task to see that certain students didn’t get the concepts.  Now some misunderstandings get caught earlier during the report out part of the dyad.

The second training session was on Feb 18.  I started to understand the philosophy of the district:  experience – formalize – practice.  Experience, through investigations, is to give our learners something to scaffold algebraic concepts.  This explains adoption of the Discovering series text.  Formalize is when we take these experiences and generalize them with mathematical statements, using multiple representations.  So far, the different representations have been graphs, equations, tables, and explanations.  I believe practice is the recognition to reinforce through repetition.

Applying Brain Rules

The reading for the Students as Learner class includes John Medina’s Brain Rules book, a fast and easy read full of what looks like useful facts.  Two rules: Exercise increases the processing power of the brain and attention lasts for 10 minutes,  had me experimenting with some changes inside the classroom.

My 6th period has a learning centered and relaxed class culture and I feel the freedom to experiment more with this class.   Last week, I asked for a time keeper and every 10 minutes (for 3 cycles) the class got up out of their seats to do something physical:  arm circles, walking around the classroom, and stretches.  I had to call out several students by name to get them out of their seats, but many were clearly eager.  The classroom arrangement is not conducive to walking around in a circular path, and I won’t try that again, but the arm circles and stretches were do-able.  Having the students get up felt like it took away from the flow of the lesson, so I won’t roll this out to the other classes yet, but it may become a regular part of Fridays, maybe before our weekly quizzes.

If I understood him correctly, a co-hort in the SPU ARC program said that his school is having a focus on the 10 minute lesson with 7 minutes of teacher focus, 2 minutes of student focus, and 1 minute of share out as a goal to plan every lesson. This past Thursday, I attended an Algebra 1 Professional Development training session, and the mathematician’s dyad was discussed and practiced.

Between the co-hort’s description, and the dyad practice, I am convinced that this is a key strategy to implement and to be tenacious about.  My goal is to plan every lesson with at least 2 dyads (preferably more) each lesson and to plan a class period into a series of “10 minute lessons.”