Noticing and Wondering as a practice with my 6th graders

When I'm using MARS tasks with my 6th graders, I have found no structure to be more effective in aligning their attentions and energies to the task than the Math Forum's Noticing and Wondering structure.

We kind of go into a "noticing and wondering" mode, in which we are choosing to limit our our monkey mind attention to just plain noticing and we let go of any other kind of attention that comes up during that cycle.

Noticing, in particular, is a quiet and nurturing structure for kids to simply be present with what they notice. We are not privileging noticings or knocking down noticings, we are simply welcoming them as valued and arriving guests.

6th graders love having a structure, so they loved the structure of noticing. Then once we'd heard from everybody,we did a round of noticing. It's powerful when space is allowed to sit with this first round of work.

Look at all these amazing insights they had:

We took a little time to admire this collection. It's a great list!

They even did great a great job of thinking about the value of doing noticing and wondering at the start. The first item from the link is from @fnoschese, whose wisdom even my middle schoolers can grasp.

Doing this task together and then talking about it made students reflect in deep ways about what kinds of growth processes were going on for them.

I just wanted to share this one implementation for anybody who is interested in ways you can use this.

Radio Silence Does Not Mean Nothing Is Happening...

Wow, did I ever fall off the radar.

Plop. That "splat" you might have heard was me, falling off the blogging radar.

But I'm back, baby.

Last night I had the most wonderful dinner with @btwnthenumbers and @woutgeo and @mythagon, who was in town for a conference/collaborative meeting, and I tell you, it pretty much restored my faith in teaching, in mathematics, and probably in all of humanity.

I have been working at a near-frantic pace these last five weeks, prepping, teaching, grading, not grading, having parent conferences, having meetings with parents and the principal, having meetings with parents and principal and superintendent, going to IEP meetings, collaborating with my department members to write goals that will help us to align our curriculum with the Common Core, and generally dealing with all those things that go haywire as soon as you start to nail down some satisfying, finite part of your teaching.

In other words, just like you, life has been kicking my ass.

But between last night and this morning's drive to work something shifted. Something sane and healthy intervened.

That something was my connection with the Twitter- blogo-sphere.

Whenever I'm feeling exhausted and run over with skid marks across my face and body, connection with my tweeps -- any connection -- seems to be the best medicine. I don't know why this is true; I only know that it is so. Remembering this makes me think of a quote I have from von Neumann hanging in the ring of inspiring quotes that encircles my classroom: "In mathematics, you don't understand things; you just get used to them." Some days that's how I feel about things in my classroom or in my school or in my life.

I only know that five or ten minutes of venting to my tweeps about an impossible situation -- even when @woutgeo is only half-listening because (a) the Giants are sucking pretty hard against the Cardinals and because (b) my venting is both predictable and boring -- it helped just to have reconnected with the connection. In Jakobsonian structuralist linguistics, this kind of communicative connection is known as a "phatic utterance" (look it up, Riemann, I have to look up all of your crap).

By this morning, I was feeling reasonably happy driving to work for a 7:30 a.m. meeting. I was not totally thrilled about the hour or having to buy gas at that hour or the price of gas for that matter, but I felt pretty great about car-dancing in the dark to Ace of Base's "The Sign" and remembering car-dancing at #TMC12 with @mgolding and @samjshah and @jreulbach and @ bowmanimal on the way to do Exeter problem sets. And I felt great when @rdkpickle's sweet soprano voice was joined by @SweenWSweens and @jreulbach singing "Tweet Me Maybe." And I even laughed when the theme from Sesame Street came on. iPod's "shuffle" feature has a somewhat perverse sense of humor.

OK, and one other thing I have learned is that my dog always knows when it's time for me to end a blog post. Just now he jumped up on my lap and pounded the laptop keyboard with his giant panda bear paw:

34ycvzn

So that's my cue to wrap this up.

I just want to say, if you are feeling alone or frustrated or exasperated and you are reading this, then for the sake of everything we hold dear, please reach out to someone else who is of like mind. "It's hard to teach right... in isolaaaaaaaaation.... So here's some PD.... just like vacation!"

Tweet me maybe, tweeps. Over and out for now.

#made4math | Words into Math - Taming Troublesome Phrases with an interactive foldable translator

It's been busy here in the Intergalactic Cheesemonkeysf R&D Laboratories
(see trusty assistant hard at work, right). Ever since Twitter Math Camp 12, I've been working on implementing all the lessons and activities I learned about in person from my fabulous math teacher tweeps!

I'm using the Interactive Notebook structure that Megan Golding-Hayes showed us, and I'm also incorporating a lot of Julie Reulbach's foldables. The most helpful insight (out of many) I received from Julie was the idea of using a foldable as a way of getting kids to SLOW DOWN and trust the steps of the process as they're working on word problems. So I've made a nifty little foldable like hers that will go into an INB pocket the first week and will be usable on all quizzes and tests.

One of the reasons I like having students develop tools they can use on tests is that many of the discouraged math learners just don't trust their own learning. They have a habit of "collapsing" when they encounter a first speed bump. So from the perspective of encouraging students' courage in problem-solving, it is good to allow them to have tools they can use, even if the tools are sometimes nothing more than a security blanket — a talisman or a good-luck charm they can touch as a tangible reminder of their own courage and resourcefulness. So a four-step problem-solving foldable serves double duty: it acts both as a checklist (as in Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece and book) and as a reminder to have courage and perseverance in working through problems.

However many students have a habit of either not using the tools or finding the tools too complicated or frustrating. Nowhere has this been more evident than when I've given them approved lists of words and phrases they should stop, consider, and look up if need be. The charts and lists seem to turn into giant floating word clouds that signify nothing. So I wanted to come up with a slightly more interactive than usual foldable that students could use as a way of isolating and decoding some of the most troublesome words and phrases they get hung up on. Not only does it slow them down, it gives them a focal task that redirects an anxious mind.

After a lot of research on both blogs and on Pinterest ("PINTEREST!" #drinkinggame), I came up with the idea of a folded sleeve with a sliding chart insert, containing the phrases that often confuse kids or cause them to second-guess their translations from words into math. Here's what the finished product looks like:

Here is a close-up:

I used OmniGraffle to make the sleeve template and I used Pages, Preview, and Adobe Acrobat to make the insert. I'm linking to the Troublesome Phrase Translator sleeve, a generic sleeve you can customize for your own fiendish purposes, and a PDF of my exact insert (Troublesome Phrase Translator INSERT). 

If you want to make your own inserts, you'll need to set up your own table (Word, Pages, Excel, etc) making sure that your row height is exactly 1/4 inch. Your LHS cells should be 1 9/16" wide and your RHS cells should be 1/2 inch wide. You can have about 19 or 20 rows, depending on what you put in them.

Sometimes a little magical thinking is just the thing to displace a discouraged learner's anxiety (or freaked-out-ness) for that extra second it might take to recommit to the process of solving a problem. If that helps me hang onto just one extra student a day, it's a win. But usually I find that a tool like this will encourage multiple students to encourage each other's confidence as well, which is an even bigger win in my book!