In 2017 I was lucky enough to be able to travel to San Diego, CA and visit the campuses of High Tech High. As described in the article, “What does personalized learning mean? Whatever people want it to.” HTH is an amazing demonstration of what fully realized personalized instruction could look like. During my visit I was able to witness student behavior, and teacher instruction that looked worlds apart from what was taking place in my classroom. During my visit I saw students in a digital arts elective working on the creation of a virtual reality framework where they could complete in games of skills with other schools. I saw history classes building boats, actual 10 person boats, with the end goal of having those boats carry students across a body of water. I saw students working in traditional classroom settings, I saw students working in wood and metal shops, I saw students working in open studios and stairwells; despite all of the distraction around them, they were all working hard.
Interviewing students at High Tech High they spoke about how important it was that teachers allow flexibility in demonstrations of understanding. Students highlighted that being able to work collaboratively with their instructor to determine learning goals and unit objectives added to their feelings of relevancy in reference to the required learning materials. I had a million questions about standards, supervision, safety, the transition from high school to college, budgeting and of course CAASPP. How could something like this ever exist in a traditional public school? I was left with the feeling that despite my current feeling of inspiration, back at my site, to many limiting factors would prevent instruction like this from working effectively. Thinking specifically about math, the subject I teach, elements of personalized learning have always been necessary. It is common for some students to excel at the procedural aspects of mathematics, while others fall behind. For every student that understands why we move variables to one side of our equation, why we follow the rise and the run of slope, why we factor and reduce, there are 5 who do not understand the concept of negative numbers, how to undo multiplications or how to add fractions. Most math teachers must create a system of interventions that allow students who need more practice with basic skills the time and space to do so without slowing down the pace of the remaining students. When I think of personalized learning the first thing that comes to mind is Khan Academy. This amazing service includes tutorials and practice problems for a variety of subjects in STEM and beyond. Khan Academy even has the power to create personalized lessons for students who create profiles, tracking their progress through various courses. Khan Academy is a powerful tool and one that many of my colleagues use in their classes to help students who need remediation. If I were to incorporate competency based learning or personalized learning into my curriculum I would absolutely begin with creating student profiles on Khan Academy. Students would be able to access online tutorials as well as additional help when they are not able to work directly with me. Khan would also allow students to track their progress on skills, allowing another way for them to demonstrate mastery of content. I could also incorporate standards based competencies. I would break down units into skills that must be mastered before a student can move one and then allow students to choose how they demonstrate proficiency to me. I imagine that for most students they would opt in to passing a quiz related to the competency but others might want to do a project or report related to the content of that competency. This would allow me to continue with whole class instruction while also allowing student voice and choice. Lastly, knowing that teaching content is the best way to ensure that you fully understand content I could incorporate small group instruction where students who have already demonstrated proficiency in a certain skill work with students who have not. The students leading instruction would have to plan a lesson that incorporated some element of technology. I believe that each students progresses at a different rate. Our current system of education prescribes topics and makes learning all subjects mandatory. Students have limited motivation to study subjects they find boring and without flexibility in assignments their teachers get frustrated by a student’s lack of motivation. Personalized instruction is something I am very interested in and I hope to learn, implement and experiment with it soon.
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As my action research progressed there came a point where I assumed that I would see a certain result. I predicted that at the end of my research project I would see a decline in the average level of math anxiety that my students experienced but that I would also see a stagnation or slight decline in their average math performance scores. There were a variety of reasons that led me to believe student capacity to perform mathematically wouldn’t increase, including: the increasing difficulty of the material being covered and the students losing interest in certain teacher based interventions toward the end of the research. After surveying the students and having them choose the most effective teacher led interventions for reducing their feelings of math anxiety I learned that students were essentially choosing interventions that provided them increased review and (because they felt that my instruction was clear) direct interaction with the instructor. Looking at the bigger picture of reducing math anxiety and increasing student capacity I concluded that students are not able to perform on assessments because the methods we use for review are largely ineffective in actually preparing them.
Seeing students largely select the same teacher led interventions: guided notes with every lecture, practice unit tests with answer keys and teacher clarity and interaction with students, it became more apparent that students are simply looking for clear, mindful instruction with intentional review elements that reflect the material they will be tested on. Keeping with the theme of reducing math anxiety in students and increasing their capacity to perform mathematics I believe that I want to refine my teacher led interventions, integrating technology like interactive video editors (EDpuzzle) and online note taking templates to create supports for student review. I will absolutely need to do more research into effective ways to unite technology and the teacher led interventions that I identify as effective. I hope that I will be able to find already existing apps that track student response and collect data so that I can more easily measure effectiveness. Based on what I have already learned in the Innovative ED program I will need to expand on my tech tool box, determining the best additions for my practice. I believe that my research is innovative because it causes me to be reflective on the interventions that I implement in my classroom. I assess how effective certain interventions are at reducing math anxiety and increasing capacity for all students. I will have to be creative in how I reach all students, integrating technology to create interactive experiences but also making those experiences just as authentic for those with limited technology. Math anxiety is a debilitating and pervasive force in education and if this issue is not addressed there are many adverse effects to both our domestic and international community. At the root of my research is the desire to see students look forward to learning math. I will have to be collaborative in working with students and other teaching staff, identifying needs, then identifying ways to satisfy those needs. As rote as learning procedure and taking notes is, innovating those processes could make a huge impact on the global math community. |
Brandon DeJesusMath Archives
July 2019
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