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This blog and discussion forum is being moderated as an expression of servant leadership in teaching & learning. As a collaborative tool for brainstorming enriching experiences for students, teacher learning groups, and district learning teams, we can inspire and build experiences to help empower each of us to personal leadership in learning. 

From the Archives

Re-inventing Teaching & Learning in Mathematics Education - Part 2: Synchronous, Online Learning and Formative Assessment Practices

12/17/2020

1 Comment

 
Welcome back to Flipping the Focus.

This is the 2nd post in a 5-part series devoted to re-imagining how assessment practices in mathematics education can be improved, in part, with pedagogically-driven uses of technology.
Female student waving to teacher via video-teleconferencing
Part 1 of the series provided an example of pedagogical principles that can be used when making decisions about how a variety of tools and representations--including interactive, digital technologies--can be leveraged to improve student learning.

In this post, you'll have an opportunity to learn more about synchronous learning and how it can:
  • relate to classroom practice; and
  • work with hybrid and online learning models.

You'll also have the chance to begin:
  • learning about Thinking Classrooms through the vignette, below;
  • sharing your own and/or asking other educators about their experiences with different models of learning and modes of delivery; and
    • expanding your professional learning network around assessment practices, various models of learning, and modes of delivery in mathematics teaching and learning.
Introduction
Reinventing, now more than ever, how technology supports math teachers and students is so important. Educators need high-quality teaching resources, pedagogical supports, and professional learning that engender and communicate respect for equity and inclusion.

So much of the educational landscape has been changing--evidenced by the current, global paradigm; shifting priorities; and efforts to hybridize learning models and make online learning successful--for example, synchronous online learning.
What is Synchronous Learning?
​
Synchronous learning occurs in real-time--i.e., in real-time, it allows educators the opportunity to connect with their students such that the immediacy of feedback is greater. 

When this mode of delivery is done remotely and online, with the support of video-teleconferencing platforms and a host of web-based applications, we need to remind ourselves that synchronous learning is but one aspect of authentic and engaging online learning.
two speech bubbles overlapping
Just like effective teaching requires opportunities for students to engage in self- and group-directed learning activities, educators working in an online environment can help support their students' learning preferences by intentionally incorporating asynchronous learning activities into their teaching.
For example, by incorporating asynchronous learning opportunities, educators can delay some of their feedback so that students can continue thinking and re-focus their attention on reflection and metacognition (Desmos, 2016).
There are also many high-impact instructional practices in mathematics that we often associate directly with formative assessment practice--establishing learning goals, co-constructing success criteria, and interacting with descriptive feedback. On some occasions, other practices might be thought of as influencing formative assessment practices like the use of problem-solving tasks, documenting and reflecting on how students use tools and representations, and actively listening to students during math conversations; while at other times, the use of other practices inform instruction and come about as a result of ongoing, formative assessment--e.g., teaching about problem solving, intentional and well-positioned use of direct instruction, small group instruction, deliberate and purposeful practice, and flexible groupings. Of course, these distinctions are but one way to think about the complex relationship between instruction and assessment: in many situations, practices that inform instruction become those that influence assessment, and vice-versa. For example:
  • We might decide to facilitate a math conversation to better uncover students' thinking (inform); on other occasions, our assessment points to students being ready for a conversation that helps to consolidate their learning (influence).​
trail - fork in the road
  • While a small group of students is working on a task, observations and conversation  indicates that direct instruction (in the form of hints and answering keep-thinking questions) is necessary (influence); on other occasions, direct instruction with several groups and/or the whole class points to using questions that are focusing in nature, followed by encouraging students to continue working on the task in small groups (inform).
What might seem to be a dichotomy--practices that inform and/or influence--is much-needed to ensure that educators and their students are better able to interact with descriptive feedback that is based on the development and refinement of success criteria. When it comes to formative assessment, the decision to use practices in ways that make us think versus uncovering and re-purposing our thinking moves us closer to attaining learning goals.

The remainder of this post focuses on the following:
  • examining and reflecting upon a conceptual model for synchronous online teaching and learning in mathematics in Secondary grades;
  • sharing our own and connecting to the experiences of others with synchronous online teaching and learning across all divisions--primary, junior, intermediate, and senior ...
​
... and all of this to help our professional community of practice support one another by providing the best answers we have, at this time, to the following question:

 How can teachers best implement these instructional practices with fidelity
​in synchronous online learning?


Vignette: Bringing Thinking Classrooms to Life Online
 
Secondary School Example: Problem-based Learning in Mr. Stewart's Mathematics Classes
Introduction:
Mr. Stewart recognizes the value in providing space for his students to think, communicate, and make visible their mathematical ideas and struggles, and to ask questions of one another. It’s within these spaces where he’s better able to listen to conversations and observe and document his students’ thinking—all of this to provide timely, descriptive feedback to his students on how they’re working towards mathematical learning goals and monitoring their responses to feedback—feedback, generally, coming in the form of hints and questions that spur students to continue thinking.
Good Tasks:
In order that he is able to provide timely and relevant feedback to students, his students’ curiosity needs to be piqued and students need to be challenged cognitively—i.e., within the scope of something they are almost ready to do. With tasks that are low-floor/high-ceiling, Mr. Stewart is able to elicit varying degrees of student thinking—thinking that is the driver of everything that happens throughout the lessons.

Defining the Task:
From the outset of the first synchronous lesson (in a series), Mr. Stewart recognizes that students will need to develop an understanding of the context in which the problem sits before the problem is fully defined. This early part of the lesson tends to be short and is narrative in fashion—generally, a series of questions are asked to activate students’ prior knowledge, clarify the information provided, and to come to a consensus on what problem needs to be solved.

​Mr. Stewart often displays visuals associated with the problem through sharing his screen and invites students to add their ideas to a Jamboard. Students are also able to raise questions and add suggestions in the chat window. 

How Students are Grouped:
With the introduction complete, students are randomly and visibly assigned to groups of three. Using Zoom, students are aware that Mr. Stewart uses the random breakout room assignment feature.
 
Jamboard logo
How Students Share Thinking:
As students move into their breakout rooms, each group is assigned a page in the recently-shared Jamboard. Typically, Mr. Stewart asks groups to relay their thoughts to one student who can add their group’s thinking to their board. In some instances, students find it just as easy to work on the problem in a parallel manner on paper, having discussion along the way.
As groups work in their breakouts, Mr. Stewart cycles through each of the rooms to observe and respond, accordingly, to students’ questions. And prior to a fully-developed approach being completed, one of the students in the group uses their webcam to capture their written work as an image and uploads it to their page in the Jamboard. With the newly-uploaded image, students then take time to continue by adding annotations and explanations with digital sticky notes.
Managing Flow:
At key points in the lessons, Mr. Stewart intentionally interrupts student-led, collaborative group work—i.e., returning to the main meeting by closing breakout rooms—to draw the class’ attention to some key moves students have been making. The placement of direct instruction at key points in the lesson offers Mr. Stewart a chance to help students co-create a narrative from how they moved from understanding the problem, through various stages, and ending with checking the reasonableness of their answer. This narrative, really is composed of success criteria—some of these anticipated; while others occurring incidentally during the course of learning.

As he prompts groups to share their thinking, Mr. Stewart is listening and looking for conjectures, estimations, sketches, use of terminology and symbolic notation, strategies uncovered in building up towards the task, and explanations—early on, many of these being expressed in a less-than-formal way.

Each sample discussed has something of value to establishing success criteria, and as students share, he asks questions of the group about the approaches they’ve taken, as well as asking the class to discuss how they might connect the representations between different groups’ approaches.

​As students share, he begins adding these highlights to some of the examples of students’ work in the pages of the Jamboard—essentially, codifying what’s been done; validating students’ contributions; and demonstrating that students can leverage what they’ve done to move into a more formal means of analyzing and solving the problem with calculations, graphs, and algebraic representations. During this part of the lesson, Mr. Stewart uses the recording (video) feature in Zoom both a means of further documentation and a resource that students can access through their LMS.

Building and Leveraging Student Autonomy:
Knowing that formative assessment, up to this point, has been purely teacher-driven, he also recognizes the value of students providing feedback to one another. Having drawn the class together for direct instruction, students are encouraged to go back to working on the problem—this time, looking at the problem solving process through a formal lens.

Given that hints were given, keep-thinking questions answered, and the class had been brought together for discussion about their approaches, students now have a few criteria that they can use to assess their next steps in the problem solving process. Through the use of breakout rooms, students are manually re-assigned to their groups such that they can continue working together. Again, Mr. Stewart cycles through the various breakout rooms to observe and support students, accordingly.

Consolidating Student Learning:
Once Mr. Stewart recognizes a place where each student has been able to successfully engage in the task and has made some progress (which could take place over several days), he brings the class together again to have students discuss their thinking and strategies they used to solve the problem. Again, this part of the session is recorded for documentation and as a resource for students.

As he listens, he continues to annotate students’ Jamboard solutions and asks the class to review the list of success criteria the class has been developing for any refinements that can be made. As students were working, Mr. Stewart conveniently added an additional page to the Jamboard where both developing success criteria and learning goal have been posted. As the lesson wraps up, he reviews each of the criteria and how students have used them to work towards the learning goal. 

Meaningful Notes:
At the end of each lesson, students are reminded that they have the Jamboard to reflect on during periods of asynchronous study. It’s often during these times, where students are encouraged to create notes that are meaningful to themselves—i.e., if you had to explain what happened in today’s lesson to yourself or to someone else, what would you say?

Formative Assessment - Next Steps:
In order that he better understands what students know and are able to do at this time (as well as each day spent working towards the learning goal), he provides them with an exit ticket. On the ticket students will notice a problem that relates to the one they’ve been working on and/or some self-assessment questions—questions asking them to articulate what is going well, what they need to work on, and if there are any particular supports they need to keep going.
Mr. Stewart tries to provide students with options he knows will both engage and encourage continuous and shared reflection. For students who enjoy writing and diagramming their thinking, students can add to the digital notebook of the class’ LMS. For students who prefer to explain their thinking orally, Mr. Stewart uses Flipgrid.
Flipgrid logo
Through this app, students record short videos of themselves. In either case, he can provide feedback to students. In the LMS, a variety of forms of feedback can be given; in Flipgrid, both video responses and comments can be made. Either before students return to class the next day and/or at the beginning of the class, students will have had a chance to review their exit tickets.

​Much of what students have shown and have shared in their work and comments will help Mr. Stewart decide if further consolidation is required, guided groups need to be formed, student thinking needs to be challenged, and/or extensions are appropriate for students to pursue. Occasionally, these exit assignments become much like a threaded discussion with students posting and commenting on each other’s posts in Flipgrid or through the discussion board in their LMS. Altogether, Mr. Stewart finds that this ‘twist’ on the use of these tools, allows students to connect and continue conversations during times of asynchronous learning.
Check Your Understanding Questions:
Based on his ongoing observations and conversations with students, Mr. Stewart now provides his students with a set of questions (4 to 6 questions) they can use to check their understanding. These questions (posted on the LMS) are only released to students when he notes that students are in a position to practice correctly. These questions are for students’ self-assessment purposes only. Answers (only) are posted to the LMS so that students can quickly determine if they’ve made a mistake, and model solutions are only shared out once students have attempted solving each problem.

​Based on all aspects of the formative assessments that both Mr. Stewart and his students have been doing, as well as his students’ interests, further consolidation sometimes involves reviewing and discussing model solutions to the questions students have completed to check their understanding. Sometimes these solutions and their explanations are recorded using screen-casting applications and shared through the class’ LMS, where students can reflect on them during times of asynchronous work. On other occasions, these solutions are shared and discuss with students in a synchronous manner during Zoom meetings.


Professional Learning and Building Your Professional Learning Network:
​Sharing Examples: Synchronous Online, Other Models of Learning and Formative Assessment Practices
 
Through the example, you were looking through a window onto how another educator is building their practice and learning alongside their students. Perhaps, you may have even been looking into a mirror reflecting your own practice: seeing similarities in your choices and actions and/or identifying with 'moves' that you've been planning to implement. Maybe there were practices being described that you're questioning and wanting to know more about the 'why' and 'how'.
window and side-view mirror
All too often we don't have an opportunity to see ourselves reflected through the examples being shared. We might also not have an opportunity to share our perspectives. This is much like what our students experience when there are many windows onto the world and others' learning and not enough mirrors to reflect their own needs and identity.
The "Balance Series"
The "Balance Series"--re-launching in 2021 with new webinars on assessment practices--works with you and other educators from around the globe to examine the complexity of teaching and learning mathematics. This series is being offered for one, simple reason: educators, myself included, aspire to be and do more in the service of student learning. And much like our students, we, too, recognize that where there is a student learning need, we might need support in how we can best support them. You can learn more about the "Balance Series" from its Summer 2020 delivery here (information updates coming soon ...).
In the meantime, we have a great opportunity to begin sharing examples from our own context, thereby providing windows and increasing the likelihood that we'll see ourselves through the examples shared and comments made by our peers. There's so much that we can learn from one another!
Balance Series Logo
How Do I Participate?
As the "Balance Series" prepares to launch for sessions geared around formative assessment, I would like to invite you to do two things: 1 - Freely contribute to our Virtual Community Builder - Formative Assessment and as often as you like (see below) and 2 - Join the "Balance Series" of webinars related to assessment as they become available.

Webinar notifications will be sent directly to the email you provide through the community builder form, below. Please rest assured that only I will use your email only to communicate with you about professional learning opportunities I'm preparing and offering. The price of admission? The only thing I ask is that you support other math educators, starting with a contribution to the community builder.

If you have any questions about this post, the "Balance Series", and/or participating with the community builder, please feel free to contact me here. 
The Virtual Community Builder - Formative Assessment
 
Question mark
Your participation is easy and straight-forward. Click one of the survey links, below (Survey-1 OR Survey-2), to respond to a few questions--some of them personal (your name and email); the majority, about the subject of this blog post and formative assessment, in general.
​Again, name and email are purely for my email communication with you. Please read on for more information concerning survey options 1 and 2.
  • Option 1: Note that this would not be much of a learning opportunity without having access to the examples and comments made by other math educators. Here's my commitment to you: If I receive Survey-1 responses, they will be openly accessible to all respondents. Once you complete the survey, you'll notice a link to view a summary of all responses. These results will not have your name or contact email, as the form will not be collecting this information. With this option, you'll be able to read about other educators' experiences, but you won't have the option to interact with them. You'll also be able to contribute more of your experiences if and when you decide you'd like to.
  • Option 2: Respond to Survey-2 if you'd like to share your contact information with others who have responded to the same survey. I.e., You want to build your professional learning network about assessment in mathematics education. When you respond to the survey, I'll send you a link to view a "Results-2" summary of all contributions. Like Survey-1, you'll also be able to contribute more of your experiences if and when you decide you'd like to. ​As this form will be set up to collect names and emails, you'll then have a way of reaching out to any or all participants in this version of the survey to further your learning. By networking with other educators, you'll be able to raise questions, have conversations, and coordinate opportunities to communicate and collaborate.
What information is the survey collecting? Will my participation be beneficial?
Absolutely! We always want to know if what we share will be of benefit to others.

When you access and respond to the Virtual Community Builder - Formative Assessment, expect to answer questions about the following:
  1. Grades you commonly teach or have a hand in supporting (e.g., School Administrator)--e.g., Primary (K to Year 3), Junior (Years 4 to 6), Intermediate (Years 7 and 8), Secondary (Years 9 to 12).
  2. If you're engaged in synchronous face-to-face learning, synchronous online learning, a hybrid of both synchronous face-to-face and online learning, or other modes of delivery, what does your assessment practice look like? Over longer periods of time (e.g., several lessons)? What does the asynchronous aspect look like? What's working? What wonderings do you have? What supports do/might you need to reach your goals (real/anticipated)?

​In support of #2, you can describe how you provide opportunities for students to interact and construct their learning together, and how students are interacting with feedback. For example, you might choose to discuss one or more of the high-impact instructional practices listed above and/or how digital technology is being used to support your students' learning.
Learn More - Balance Series
Survey-1
Survey-2
Results-2
Recall: When you respond to Survey-2, I'll send you a link to view a "Results-2" summary of all contributions.
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Final Thoughts
In closing, I can't help but to think of the conversations that can be inspired when we take collective action to improving student learning. As this blog, and services provided through Flipping the Focus, is a means for readers to network and gradually change the context for how they learn, teach and lead, we all benefit by drawing nearer to the perspectives shared here and shared beyond with our professional learning networks. 

I am more than happy to collaborate with you and make our learning visible, here. If at any time, you have questions or comments, please feel free to comment to this blog and/or contact me.

Professionally Yours,
Chris Stewart, OCT
Educational Consultant, Flipping the Focus (c) 2020
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References
The Desmos Guide to Building Great (Digital) Math Activities. (2016, May 11). Retrieved from https://blog.desmos.com/articles/the-desmos-guide-to-building-great-digital-math/

Government of Ontario. (2010). Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario's Schools, Kindergarten to Grade 12. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/success.html

Government of Ontario. (2020). Instructional Approaches in Mathematics. Retrieved from https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/elementary-mathematics/context/some-considerations-for-program-planning-in-mathematics

Gutiérrez, R. (2018). The Need to Rehumanize Mathematics [Introduction]. In I. Goffney, R. Gutiérrez & M. Boston (Eds.), ​Rehumanizing Mathematics for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Students (pp. 1-10). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Liljedahl, P. (2021). Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics - Grades K to 12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.
1 Comment
Walnut Creek Office Cleaning link
9/5/2022 04:09:34 am

Great read thankk you

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    Chris Stewart, OCT Educational Consultant, Flipping the Focus

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    I am passionate about leadership for learning and teaching and learning through inquiry. Through collaborative exploration of high-yield, pedagogical strategies, I have been able to further engage students to deepen their learning and fellow educators in continuously growing their practice--Flipped Learning, Thinking Classrooms, culturing Student Voice, and balancing approaches to instruction in Mathematics--as examples.  I hope that this site serves you well in your educational journey through teaching and learning by moving professional learning into your time ... your space. If you have questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me. Sincerely, Chris Stewart (OCT).

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I am passionate about leadership for learning and teaching and learning through inquiry. Through collaborative exploration of high-yield, pedagogical strategies, I have been able to further engage students to deepen their learning and fellow educators in continuously growing their practice--Flipped Learning, Thinking Classrooms, culturing Student Voice, and balancing approaches to instruction in Mathematics--as examples. I hope that the sites and resources I have created serve you well in your educational journey through leadership for learning, teaching and learning by moving professional learning into your time ... your space. If you have questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me. Sincerely Yours, Chris Stewart |OCT | Founder & Educational Consultant, Flipping the Focus.

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