This morning I had a realization. I spend more time assessing whether or not my students did notes (via a 3 Question Daily Quiz and me checking notes) than it would take to watch the video in class. For example it may take around 20 or 25 minutes to hand out Daily Quiz Papers, check each student's notes, and correct the Daily Quizzes. The videos are about 10 minutes long and I assign one or more commonly two for homework. This means that I could simply show the video during class and either gain 10 minutes or not lose any time at all.
This is powerful for many reasons:
- I have seen several students watching the video while listening to music. So they aren't hearing my explanations and listening to my think-alound as I do one or two example problems.
- I have also seen other students who fly through the notes because they move the video scroll bar to where I have writing and pause it, then move the video scroll bar to where I have writing, ... or in other words copy from the video instead of watching and listening.
The downside is that many students watch the video, pause it to write notes, etc. like they are supposed to. I personally love the idea of my students taking notes for homework because they can take notes at their own pace. I would hate to change the nature of the class because a few students think the notes are more important than learning from the video. I know that the videos are available online, therefore they could go back and take better notes if they want, but I don't know if they would.
After this realization ...
If I do decide to simply watch the videos during class, I realized that the video doesn't have to come at the beginning of the class period. It could come somewhere in the learning cycle. Whenever I hear Ramsey Musallam (Twitter: @ramusallam) talk about the importance of exploration, learning cycles, and his explore-flip-apply model I completely agree but I struggle knowing how to do it in Geometry in my classroom. This could be one way that I can do it.
My class could:
- Spend some time exploring a concept using a paper activity, web activity, NCTM Illuminations activity, etc ...
- Then watch the video and taking notes
- Do some practice activities using problems from the textbook, or completing some task to show mastery.
- Synthesize their learning with a detailed summary.
No homework in a math class?
This will only work if I don't assign any homework at all. No matter what I assign for homework, I will want to go around the room and assess it. This generally takes 20 to 30 minutes of valuable class time. On the other hand if I limit our math learning to 85 minutes every other day, I wonder if this will be a detriment or not. Assigning homework is a great time to have more time on task, especially for my lower students. When I am considering making a change my first thought is "How will it impact my lower students?" My top students will be fine as long as I deliver content, but my low students need support.
Explore-Flip-Apply?
If my students are only working during class, then a struggle is created between exploring and applying. I want to keep my students together. I am afraid that I might spend too much time exploring or applying and not keep up with the pace of the class.
I really struggled last year with asynchronous learning, my top students went really fast and my lowest students went really slow. If I keep them all together then the top students help the lower students. This is especially important my classes because the difference between high students and low students is really wide (at a high school with no honors math classes in a class required for every student).
Well...
This blog post isn't as enlightening as I hoped it would be. But it has helped me think through some different possibilities that I need to keep thinking about.
If you have any suggestions or comments, please leave them below. I would love to read your thoughts.
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