3/8/07

There are so many things to think about when beginning Moving Straight Ahead. The first thing that pops into my mind is how to make sure that all of my students are successful. When I student-taught, we grouped students by readiness level for this book. In my first year of teaching, we did basically the same thing, but we had a smaller team. That limited the number of groups we could create.

This year raises the same question. We have given the students a pre-test for this book (which is the same as the post-test that they will take at the end of the book). The pre-test is important to give (especially for data reasons), but it didn't actually give us a lot of information. I don't know whether anyone on our team passed the test. There were some students who were able to solve the equations, but they didn't solve them using the symbolic method. Is that necessary for their achievement with this book?

It appears that this year we are just going to leave students in the classes they are already a part of. This means that we have huge discrepancies in math skills and work ethic. Moving Straight Ahead is a book that brings out unexpected skills/struggles in students. I've had students who had a very hard time with other math books, but this book was a great book for them. Our school has a high number of English Language Learners. This book may be easier for them because there is less writing involved in each problem. However, I've also had students who excelled in every math book but this one. They had major trouble with this book because they just couldn't wrap their minds around the concepts that are presented.

So this leaves me with a slight dilemma. Do I give more attention to a certain group of students, or do I need to make sure that all students are excelling in this book? One of the criteria for placing our students in eighth-grade algebra is how well they do with this book. Should I give more of my time and energy to the higher level students, because they are the ones who will directly apply this learning toward next year? Or should I spend most of my extra time with the students who struggle with math and who will need a lot of help wrapping their mind around this more abstract thinking? Since my classes are made up of students of different levels, is there a way I could group them so that my higher level students are working together and my middle level and lower level students are working together? We can summarize some of the investigations as a class, but my higher level students could skip some of the other investigations. If I take the higher-level students out of the discussion, will the rest of my students get as good a summary as possible?

As you can tell, I'm not at all sure what I'm going to do with this book. So far, we have done problems 1.1 and 1.2. The first one was easy, but 1.2 had multiple levels of achievement. We have summarized both of them as a whole class because that information is essential for Investigation 1.

I'm going to set up a meeting with our math specialist, Michelle, to discuss some of my concerns. Last time we spoke, she had some ideas on how we could differentiate, so that all of our students do well with this book. No teacher wants to choose who gets to be successful and who doesn't, and Michelle will help us avoid that.

My last blog entry was about the discrepancies in the scores of my two math classes. I wrote that I needed to look closer at the test scores to see whether there was a difference between my two classes. Well, there was. In my first class, I had five A's, seven B's, and one D; in my second class there were seven A's, four B's, one C, and three D's. In my first class, 92% of the students received a B or above. In my second class, 73% of my class received a B or above. It is interesting that my second class had more A's, but there was a greater spread among test scores. Just some of the things that I think about…