I start every class with a PSAT practice problem. Every school has a standardized test that is important to them: ACT, end-of-course exam, SAT, etc. I teach at St. Mary’s Episcopal School, a high-academic all-girls school in Memphis, TN. We find that focusing on the PSAT during the student’s sophomore year helps prepare them for many of the standardized tests they will take.
Some teachers never use multiple-choice questions when they teach, thinking that it doesn’t challenge their students as much as an open-ended question. Actually, there are a lot of advantages to asking multiple-choice questions in a class. There are a limited number of choices, and the wrong answers are intentionally meant to be distractors. If you are using a standardized test question, you can be assured that a lot of time was put into selecting each of the wrong answers. I find that seeing what students selected as their wrong answer gives me insight into their problem solving steps.
Here is an example:
I used TI-Nspire Navigator to send out the question to the whole class. I can instantly see their responses:
As part of the routine, I ask a student who got the question right how they did it.
Then, I follow up the question by asking why someone would have chosen 4/3 as the answer (the most popular wrong answer). Since the students get to view the results, the students who got the question wrong can see that other people made similar mistakes that they did. This changes the dynamic in my class. Students regularly own up to the mistake they made. Bravery like this in the classroom doesn’t happen if technology is not involved. What is interesting about this particular error is that it really isn’t a math error that they made. To me, it is more of a reading error. They answered the value of w, instead of answering the question that was posed. There is an easy remedy for this, always, always, reread the question before putting your final answer.
I have another part to this routine which can be eye-opening. Using the time stamp feature in TI-Nspire Navigator, I can see which student answered faster than anyone else. Calling on that student I will ask if she solved the problem any different from the rest of us? It turns out, she did.
Do you see the shortcut? There have been many times where students see a better way of solving than I do. We need students to see that there is more than one way to solve a problem.
Using technology to ask all the students in my class (and view their responses) gives every student a voice. It is a game-changer for me.
In the book, Embedded Formative Assessment by Dylan Wiliam, he says “when teachers allow students to choose whether to participate or not—for example, by allowing them to raise their hands to show they have an answer—they are actually making the achievement gap worse, because those who are participating are getting smarter, while those avoiding engagement are forgoing the opportunities to increase their ability. This is why many teachers now employ a rule of “no hands up except to ask a question” in their classrooms (Leahy, Lyon, Thompson & Wiliam, 2005).”
I love practical advice like that! I don’t always follow it, but I now have a goal that I can shoot for. In my class, starting each class with the same routine challenges students to see other ways of solving problems and learn from their mistakes.
What routines enhance the learning in your classroom?
– Jeff McCalla @jmcalla1
– Blog: Jmccalla1.wordpress.com
