How glue makes things fall apart...

I always forget what glue does to my students.

I'm using a series by Scholastic to teach my students a unit on fractions. It's called Do the Math by Marilyn Burns. I'm a big fan of Scholastic products. I'm also a big fan of the people at Scholastic. Never before have I encountered a company so willing to listen to input from teachers and to change/adapt their products for use in the classroom based on that input. I digress, though. Back to the glue.

We are studying fractions. My students are learning what they are. I am learning how to teach about them. I've tried, rather unsuccessfully, for the last two years to cover this topic with my students. Then, someone recommended that I check out this series, and I fell in love with it. It is basically idiot-proof. And when I say "idiot-proof", I'm talking about idiot-proof for the teacher. Unless you try to do something different from what is in the book, you will have success teaching with this series. If you go outside of what the book details, you will confuse your students and yourself. Just follow the program. At least that is what I thought until yesterday.

We've been studying fractions for a few weeks. The kids have these great manipulatives that they use at their desk to solve all the math problems. The focus for the first few weeks is simply in getting them to understand equivalent fractions in the 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 realm. From there, we'll add in other fractions. But they are working exclusively with these for right now, and they have been for the last few weeks.

Yesterday, though, we switched from thinking about fractions in terms of strips to thinking about fractions in circles. This was a quantum leap for my students that the series took for granted. The circles plus the addition of glue to the problem-solving process made it impossible to accomplish much.

I started out the class asking the students to get their supplies: scissors and glue. These are middle school students, but the glue just put them over the edge. I turned my back for a second, and I turned back around to find four girls gluing random things to their notebooks. Whooooaaaa. Put a stop to that. Then we got into the actual lesson.

Now the book really is normally pretty straight-forward. There are step-by-step examples at the top of every page for the students to follow. The directions yesterday were pretty simple. They were solving problems about sharing cookies. For example, at the top of the page, it would say, "4 people share 3 cookies equally." And then the kids had to figure out how to divide those three cookies among four boxes on their paper. The three cookies were represented by circular pieces of paper, and they could cut those to make sure that everyone got the same amount.

The directions at the top of the page listed these steps:
1. Take the number of cookies in the problem.
2. Share the cookies equally.
3. Paste and label the cookies.
4. Write the sentence at the bottom of the page.
And there was a pictorial representation to go with this to explain what happens in each step.

I went through two examples with the kids. I did one on the board. We did one together. Then, I asked them to get to work and do three problems on their own.

All hell broke loose.

One student started randomly gluing "cookies" to her page without actually counting how many were needed in the problem.
One student started working on the back page of the packet--the part of the packet that I had photocopied for Monday's practice.
One student did step one but then skipped to step three without bothering to try to share the cookies first. Person number four was left out in the cold with no cookies on her sheet.
One student, my most advanced, started thinking in terms of dividing the cookies in half and then the remaining halves into fourths. No problem. Except his brother, who was sitting next to him, was watching and trying to copy without understanding why.
One student, when labeling, forgot all the rules of fractions and counted up the total number of pieces on his board (12--each cookie divided into four pieces) and labeled each cookie part as 1/12 even though we've never seen that fraction before.

I intervened as a class when I realized things were going wrong. Then I intervened individually as I could. Then I just lost my ever-loving mind and put a stop to the whole thing and sent them out of the room to their next teacher so that I could regroup and figure out where the heck I had gone wrong.  I figured out several things:

1. Never, ever, ever include glue in a project without telling the kids that they have to ask before they glue.
2. Never assume that kids can make a transition from one thing (the fraction strips) to another (the circle) without checking for understanding first.
3. Always check your teacher materials in advance to make sure that you have what you need, the kids have what they need, and the papers that you think are there are actually there. When I did the examples with the kids yesterday, I thought that they had papers in their packets to do the examples with me, and they didn't.
4. Feel free to add an extra step in there that will help the students. I should have required them to divide ALL circles into fourths before sharing out their cookies. And then they could have figured out whether they had wholes or not.
5. Don't be afraid to lay on the floor on the classroom moaning and groaning as a means of personal therapy while teaching. Kids find it endearing that you are suffering for them. (And they'll ask you questions while you are laying there anyway).

blah blah blah... teacher talk time

I woke up this morning thinking about teacher talk time. Literally. I was actually dreaming about an action research project, and my husband woke me up, and my brain was spinning with ideas about how to get this done. My CLIMBS partner and I are going to be delivering a PD to teachers at our school this summer. It will have some elements of the CLIMBS model in it, but we will need to pick and choose the topics carefully to maximize the PD for the other teachers.

Throughout CLIMBS, I have been trying to convince teachers that it is really important that their ELLs are actually speaking in class. (Honestly, I think it's really important that ALL students are speaking in class. They should be engaging the content by using academic language and the vocabulary of the content orally and in writing.) I often say that I am convinced that there are students in our school who go an entire day without speaking. I should revise that to say that I think that there are students who go an entire day without speaking about academic content.

In a class of 30 students, in a 45 minute period, if each student has the floor with no teacher talk time, that means each student would speak for just 90 seconds in a class period. That's with a bunch of ifs. I've been in classes where teachers did 90% of the talking. That meant that there were only about 5 minutes left for the students to do the talking. 5 minutes. 30 students. You do the math. But my dream about an action research project on this makes me want to put my money where my mouth is.

I've thought of two different approaches. One is to pick a couple of students and follow them for a day. I'd like to just watch them and keep track of how many times in the day they engage in the content orally in class. The other is to go around to each teacher's classroom for one period and keep track of two things. 1) How much of the time in the class the teacher is speaking and how much of the time the students are speaking. 2) How much of the student speaking is actually using the content language.  I'm rambling, though. Because as I write this, I think about the number of challenges to either of these approaches. Perhaps, I should go less formal.

The idea, either way, is to just have some more or less hard data to share with the teachers when we get together this summer. I do want to see if what I suspect is accurate--that most students are not orally engaging with the content regularly in their classes. But I also hope to see if this is impacting not only ELLs but also the other students.

This stems from a structured activity I did in my class on Thursday last week. I actually gave my students a "script" to follow as they engaged one another to get information from each other to fill in their papers. And when students started, they were nervous. They didn't have control of the language. They weren't sure even what they were asking. By the time they spoke to the 15th student in the class, I saw them gaining confidence and academic language that they could use in their classes. The content matter was the States of Matter. But the language that they were practicing was academic information gathering. And late in the day, when I was in conversation with one of my students and the conversation spontaneously produced the question, "Can you spell that for me?" I was thrilled.

But I wondered if having structured activities with structured oral language would have an impact on other classrooms, as well, or if I was seeing things through the narrow lens of my class and my particular students. Too, this is an informal survey I'm planning. I know there is already hard data out there. There are plenty of researchers smarter than me who have done this work before. I'm not really looking to reinvent the wheel. Rather, I want to know if what the research is showing is true in our school, as well. Guess we'll see.

On the Burmese and cold weather and peer pressure and coats...

It's cold here in Kentucky. It's not Michigan-cold, but it's cold. I actually moved away from Michigan because it is so darn cold. And I hate snow. I hated waking up on cold mornings to the sound of my father clearing the snow and ice off of our cars from the night before. Sometimes, I'd just hear the sound of scraping and pounding. Other times, it was scraping, pounding, and muffled profanity. Other times, it was the sound of my father stomping his feet just inside the front door to shake the snow off his boots before coming up the stairs to wake us up to help him clear off the cars. I'm not a fan of snow.

I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of my students have had relatively little exposure to cold weather. Many are from Thailand. One is from Cuba. For many, the norm was not to wear shoes. For Westerners, this seems to bring about an "awwww" moment... people should wear shoes, for crying out loud. And if they don't, it's because of poverty. I'm not so sure that this was the case for my students. I know that many of them lived in poverty, but their shoelessness was less a reflection of that and more a reflection of the hot climate. Why wear shoes?

So my students arrive in the United States and the shoe expectation is a bit of a shocker. Most of them prefer flip-flops. Year-round flip-flops. Oftentimes, even if they wear flip-flops, I realize that they've kicked off their shoes in the classroom and are running around shoeless. Every October or so, I take the kids to the FRYSC to get them shoes if I see that they don't have anything close-toed. Our amazing FRYSC has gotten shoes for my kids to appear out of the blue. We usually have to provide them with socks, too.

And then winter rolls around, and it's coat time. This year, I took all of my students to the FRYSC at once and we had a coat giveaway. EVERYONE got a new coat. So I know they all have coats.

And now it's cold. And many of them won't wear their coats. I honestly teeter between saying, "Well, I got them the coats. Now it's up to them to wear them" and "No one is at home to tell them it's cold, so they should put on a coat, so I need to remind them." This week, I was in the latter camp.

By Friday, we were in a bit of a situation. Not only were my Burmese students not wanting to wear their coats, but the non-Burmese kids had picked up on it, and for whatever reason were deciding they didn't want to wear their coats, either. I was in the middle of an anti-coat revolt in my classroom. Peer pressure was taking over my classroom and not in a good way.

Maybe I should just give up the fight. Why is this bothering me so much? I don't know. I'm thinking that it has something to do with that mothering thing about wanting my "kids" to wear their coats so people don't think that they don't have them? I have no idea. I want to protect them from themselves a little bit...when they get cold, they are more susceptible to illness, and they don't need to be sick. And I don't like to get sick. And when they get sick, I get sick? I know they are clueless about the weather here. They don't have it ingrained in them that you just wear warm things when it's cold outside (although that would seem to be intuitive).

So here's the irrational teacher admission. I don't have many of these moments in my classroom, but I think I'm there. My control-freaky self has taken over, and I have now threatened my kids to make them wear their coats. That's right. They have to wear their coats, or they will lose a stick (this is the "money" of my classroom). And on Friday, I took it one step further. They'll also have extra homework on Monday if they don't wear a coat.

Oh, crap. I've heard it said that you shouldn't have a confrontation with teenagers unless you are sure you are going to win. And once you've gained some ground, you better hold on to it, or you'll lose what you've gained and then some. I'm thinking I'm trying to play king of the mountain with a bunch of kids standing on top of the mountain with their arms crossed. Not only am I not gaining ground, but I'm probably fighting a losing battle for no reason other than that once I've started the fight, I better keep it up until I win or die trying. Wrestling the gorilla, once again.

Oh, and did I mention that the whole thing might just be because they are teenagers and coats aren't "cool"? I mean, when I was a kid in Michigan, it was okay to wear a winter coat, but you weren't cool if you zipped it up. So maybe I'm fighting a losing battle against teenagers who are just trying to be cool? And what teenager isn't?

Onward.

Inventing the wheel... again...and again...and again...

Through several levels of miscommunication, I thought I was going to have a visitor today. I did a ton of prep last night (which I would have/should have/needed to have done anyway) for an activity that I thought would be at least interesting to watch. My visitor was a no-show, but the activity went well anyway. It was the classic information gap activity with a load of scaffolding; the topic was states of matter. The good thing is that the activity was a good one, and it's one I'll use again next year. The not-so-good thing was that it took A LOT of work to get ready. And after I had gotten it ready, I realized that I'm not doing enough of this kind of speaking activity with my students. Must do more.

But where does inventing the wheel again come in? I'm wondering if I'm doing that. Am I missing something? I've done a lot of searches, but I'm not finding enough stuff out there that integrates content and academic English in a way that would work for a group of mostly semi-literate middle schoolers. Yes, I'm looking for a very specific curriculum. Maybe I should just write one and then sell it. There's an idea.

It would have to integrate technology. I haven't seen any sort of curriculum that successfully does that. I got my hands on an iPad today, and the technology is incredibly promising.