Smith Curriculum and Consulting

10 Ways to Stay Creative When You Aren’t Feeling It

September 22, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 1 Comment

So you are roughly four to six weeks into the school year and you are hitting some walls with lack of motivation and staying creative and there are days that you are asking yourself, “When is the next three day weekend?”

Over the Summer we took time to recharge our batteries, get creative and have fun. As a teacher, we need to carve time out of our regular schedule to do just the same so that we can continue to be the best that we can be.

Top 10 Ways to Stay Creative (and save your Sanity)…

10. Read a book about something new.

9. Rent a movie, get into your comfy pajamas and relax at home on the couch.

8. Go on a walk. Get out there and put your feet to the pavement, it’s good for you!

7. Take a class in your area. There are several companies that have started such as Painting with a Twist where you can go and have a blast. I have done a few different painting nights and even blogged about it here.

6. Pick up the phone and call your bestie! Chat about anything and everything! (Keep a notepad handy for random things that come to your mind.)

5. Read “Steal Like an Artist” and enjoy! Lots of great ideas on finding creativity EVERYWHERE!

4. Get out of the house and take your work with you. Find a new surrounding (coffee shop, library, etc.) and let the normal distractions that would phase you allow you to get some much needed work done.

3. Take a day off! We all need mental health holidays here and there!

2. Pamper yourself. Taking time to get a mani/pedi, massage, facial, etc. gives you time to reflect and open your mind.

1. Go on a date! Whether it is with your significant other, girlfriend, former mentor, etc. just get out and have some conversation time to where you see each other face to face and bounce ideas off of each other.

I hope this helps some of you and feel free to bookmark it and come back to it as needed!

What can you do to help you boost your creativity and mojo in the down times?

Making Geometry Click with Geometiles

August 18, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 1 Comment

$Using Geometiles in the classroom to deepen your student's understanding of geometry, fractions and more can be fun and engaging!$ Thinking back to my days in Geometry (and even before) it was always a struggle for me. There were so many concepts to connect together in such a short amount of time and it truly overwhelmed me. I never had a chance to investigate things with manipulatives longer than maybe a 20 minutes time span and never in high school when I truly needed it. Geometry quickly became my least favorite topic and even stayed that way once I became a teacher simply because of my past experiences.

When Geometiles contacted me and asked if I would like to take some time to play and learn with their 96 piece set, I jumped on the chance because I knew that while geometry was struggle for me and my students, that many of you also had this same struggle.

When I first got the box I was excited to open it and check out all that it included as they were brand new to me. Once I opened the box I started getting all kinds of ideas on what I could then build with the different shapes that are included. With the way that the tiles click together they can easily create two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional objects. With these concepts just scratching the surface, Geometiles has also created an online resource library on lessons to use the tiles with learning about angles, ratios, teaching FRACTIONS (yes, fractions), and then also exploring Platonic and Archimedean solids.

$Using Geometiles in the classroom to deepen your student's understanding of geometry, fractions and more can be fun and engaging!$

While starting to play with these I simply just played in the beginning. I allowed myself to create objects of various shapes and sizes to get experience with how the tiles worked together. Once I had my grasp I decided to download the Shape Challenge Workbook for Fourth Grade and up. When I first started looking at it I was quickly reminded of the Lego books that come with all the various sets.

$Using Geometiles in the classroom to deepen your student's understanding of geometry, fractions and more can be fun and engaging!$

The challenges provided in this workbook are each open-ended and would be GREAT for a STEM Bin for your classroom. The questions grow in complexity and begin as simple as “Make a square in four different sizes.” and then it builds up to asking, “Make a quadrilateral that has no lines of symmetry and none of whose sides are parallel to each other.” Both of these require knowledge of geometric vocabulary and thinking beyond just drawing with a pencil.

If you are looking for something to add to your classroom manipulatives, or even maybe in your own home, I would definitely check out the different packages available of Geometiles as they are a component I recommend for all grades!

What is Response to Intervention (RTI)?

July 15, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 2 Comments

Our role as Educators is to ensure all students learn and are successful. In a perfect world, this would be easy. We teach our class a skill or topic and all of those smiling faces are able to comprehend and apply it to their daily lives. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, and unfortunately all of our students don’t learn at the same rate and level.

Students struggle for various reasons. There could be a language barrier, a learning disability, or poor attendance. Regardless of the reason, we need to find solutions to help them succeed. That solution is called RTI, or Response To Intervention.

The goal of RTI is for the school to step in, or intervene, and help students before they fall too far behind. It is a proactive approach to measuring students’ skills and using this data to decide which types of targeted teaching to use. (Source)

The RTI process begins with screening the general education population. Struggling learners are provided with interventions at increasing levels of intensity to accelerate their rate of learning. The interventions could be given by the general education teacher, the special education teacher, and/or specialists. Progress is closely monitored for the learning rate and level of performance of the individual student. For the RTI process to work effectively, the following RTI components must be implemented: high-quality classroom instruction, ongoing student assessment, tiered instruction, and parental instruction.

RTI is broken up into different tiers, or levels of intervention that a school can implement. Tier 1 includes the general education population. All students in the general education population are tested at this tier. They are tested to ensure they are responding to the instruction they are receiving before they start to fall behind and struggle. Tier 1 includes positive behavior interventions such as rules, routines and physical arrangements that are developed and taught by school staff to prevent initial occurrences of bad behavior.

Tier 2 of RTI focuses on the students who are not responding well to the Tier 1 interventions. Tier 2 is for a targeted group of students. These students may receive an increase in the time and intensity that they are exposed to the core curriculum. Students may be placed in small groups to work on the specific skills that they are having trouble with.

Tier 3 of RTI is the intensive intervention stage. Students who have been found to be eligible for special education and related services will be placed in a more inclusive setting for more specialized support. Progress monitoring is essential at this stage. More time on a skill and small group instruction are to be expected at this level.

Do you feel some of your students may be at the beginning stages of struggling? Want to catch them before they really fall behind? Check out my RTI Road Block document available in my FREEBIE Resource Library. It’s an easy tool teachers and older students can both use to assess which skills need to be worked on, a plan of how they will work on them, and an evaluation of the process.

And if you are looking for resources for Intervention, I have begun to create a series of creations called Stop, Intervene and Learn. Each of these resources are meant to be done in small groups, are completely interactive and engaging for your students, include practice/assessment for each component, full color photos and more!

The Debate between Warm-Ups and Exit Tickets

July 8, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 1 Comment

Do you use Warm Ups in your classroom? Come see why I converted to using only Exit Tickets in my classroom and I began to be able to better assess and understand the learning of my students on a regular basis with some tips on new types of Exit Tickets and ways of grading.

I’ve had many conversations over the past few years with teachers about the use of Warm Ups and/or Exit Tickets in the classroom. I always start with asking which of the two, or both, that teachers used but also why they chose that. Time and time again it has become very obvious that most teachers were using only warm-ups in their classrooms while very few, if any, were using exit tickets. Those that gave reasons were mainly that of maintaining a spiral review throughout the school year and assessing on material learned prior.

When it all comes down to it both warm-ups and exit tickets have their benefits and just like many others I have used both in my classroom until 2011 when I converted to only using Exit Tickets.

Why only Exit Tickets?

As a middle school teacher I noticed that my students would get hung up on warm-ups way beyond the time that we had to spend on them. Seriously, I would give them two grade-level appropriate (and sometimes below grade level) word problems and they would want to spend 20+ minutes solving them. They knew their strategies, they knew what the problem was asking but they always got stuck on the computation. Their weak foundation in basic operations continued to kick their tails.

When blessed with a class period that was only 42 minutes long I could not give up more than about 5-7 minutes for this each day never mind counting in time to actually check the warm-ups and go over them together.

In the middle of a school year I started implementing exit tickets after a concept had been covered at least two days. So if I started converting rational numbers on Monday and we created our Interactive Notebook Flippable to demonstrate the steps in converting fractions, decimals and percents and did an output activity and then on Tuesday I tied that concept into Comparing and Ordering Rational Numbers, it was time for an Exit Ticket on Converting Rational Numbers.

When I create Exit Tickets I like them to be an open-ended response so students can truly show me what they know. Open-Ended also allows the students to explain themselves in words when many of them trip over how to accurately compute answers. Being able to describe what they would do builds that confidence in actually applying it towards further computation skills.

One type of Exit Ticket that my students LOVE is Post It, Prove Its. One, they are using Post Its and who doesn’t love using Post Its? Two, they have a small limited space and don’t have to worry about writing a novel of a response. Three, it’s semi-anonymous since their name goes on the back under the sticky part. You can read more about Post It, Prove It in this post.

How do you Assess Exit Tickets?

Assessing Exit Tickets was something that I had to learn over time. Originally I was not grading them in any way. That proved to be the wrong thing to do once my middle schoolers found that out because they started to get lazy.

When choosing to grade Exit Tickets in the classroom, sometimes it is best to use a rubric or point system for easy checking. This Exit Ticket (and others) are available FREE through the Resource Library!

Soon I began to implement a grading policy where I created a checklist for each class. Over a two-three week period I would give 4 to 5 exit tickets and based on the level of completion of each students would receive a participation grade. I always told my students ahead of time if it was going to be 4 or 5 exit tickets during the span of time and they would be graded on a 20 or 25 point scale each which were posted in my classroom for all to see. Based on the compilation of those exit tickets the students would receive one grade.

Want to grab my Exit Ticket Rubrics? Simply sign up for the Newsletter and you get the Editable version for FREE in the Resource Library!

Overtime with all of my students I began to see growth in their confidence of math through using these quick assessments in our classroom. Students understood the role they played in our classroom and how the feedback that I gave them from their answers could assist them in their learning. Feedback on exit tickets is crucial as it is what guides students continued learning of the concept and also allows you to pull small groups or suggest tutoring for students. When you give your exit tickets back to your students they can simply tuck them in a pocket inside their Interactive Notebook to keep or tape them onto the page that you used them on.

Taking time each day to read and respond to the exit tickets even if a simple GREAT JOB or a more detailed message about the process that they took to answer their question and/or explain their process. I know that means spending a few minutes to read through for each student but it is definitely worth it for student’s growth in all subjects.

Looking for a quick and easy Editable Exit Ticket to implement into your classroom? Feel free to grab my Editable Exit Tickets for only $1.50! There are three different versions including 4 per page, 2 per page vertical and 2 per page horizontal. All have at stoplight for self-assessment by students before they submit their exit ticket.

So, will you try Exit Tickets more now?

Creating Reasoning Talks for Your Classroom

June 18, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 6 Comments

Recently I had Dr. Cory Bennett share with us about Reasoning Talks (Number Talks that focus on Reasoning) and how to use them in the Middle School classroom. So many of your responded asking for more information and I am finally here to share that with you.

Some of the highlights I took from Cory’s session at NCTM Annual in San Antonio are that:

When developing a reasoning talk we must switch from just computational and help our students develop reasoning skills when processing through the problem.
We don’t always want an answer right away. Most of the time with reasoning talks we truly want students to create a conversation about the methods for solving and WHY they think that.

Developing Reasoning Talks

When we as the facilitator of these reasoning talks sit down to plan them out ahead of time (critical step to do) we must ask ourselves, “How am I going to make connections to what my students are already bringing to the table?”

Understanding the prior knowledge of our students will help us create better, and more engaging, reasoning talks with quality probing and clarifying questions. Think ahead to what answer you are wanting from your students and work backwards to determine the question that you need to ask to get that answer.

Using the template that Dr. Bennett has created for us, these guidelines that I have added (see photo) are to help you in your creation.

Examples of Reasoning Talks

As further example for developing reasoning talks in your classroom, I have developed three different examples for you. The first of which is aligned to standards for solving real world problems that involve multiplying fractions by a whole number.

The second example that I have created for you involve solving real world problems that involves using variables to write equations and then solve them based on given information.

And then the final example that I want to show you involves determining area and then finding fractional portions of that area and what is remaining- talk about MULTI-STEP problem!

And with that I hope that these examples can help you implement Reasoning Talks in your classroom. Remember, building communication about what they are learning is one of the goals as that helps them to explain their thinking behind their math. Spend some time this summer to think about how that you can implement these into your classroom for the coming year and if you have any questions, feel free to ask because I’m here and will listen!

Math With a Purpose: Making Students Think Notes and Links

June 7, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen Leave a Comment

Thank you so much for attending my session, “Math with a Purpose: Making Students Think“. I truly am passionate about finding ways to foster creative thinking in my math class and have been since I started teaching in 2003. I have consistently been on a mission to find new and inventive ways to help engage learners no matter their learning style, possible accommodations, etc. and over time I’ve tried, failed and kept on trying and I hope that some of the ideas I shared with you are some things that you can realistically take back to your classroom and implement.

Simply click on the photo above (the title screen) to download the entire presentation that I shared today. Also, if you weren’t able to complete the notes today, click on the notes sheet and you can download the completed notes for you.

Are you interested in having the bookmarks for use in your classroom? You got it! Click here and you will be taken to a page of bookmarks that you can use.

Looking for the Growth Mindset Banner? Check it out from To The Square Inch over on Teachers Pay Teachers. She is an amazing math teacher in New York and she has Growth Mindset down pat! And The Expert Poster… it’s a FREEBIE!

Do you remember seeing me talk about Project Based Learning? The sample I showed you was a project I created called If I Had a Million Dollars and not only did my student’s love it but so have over 50,000 students since 2012. I’ve also gathered some other PBL from some friends you might want to check out as well.

And if you are looking to add the book, “The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes” to your classroom library, go grab it on Amazon (affiliate link- no increase in price for you) today!

Guest Post: Reasoning Talks: Bridging Number Talks by Focusing on Reasoning with Dr. Cory Bennett

May 10, 2017 by Jennifer Smith Jochen 12 Comments

Today, I am so excited to bring to you a guest post that many of you have been begging for! Dr. Cory Bennett of Bennett Educational Consulting and Associate Professor of Education at Idaho State University recently opened my eyes on how to effectively incorporate Number Talks in the Middle School classroom while I was at NCTM Annual Conference. So much so that I almost immediately asked him (I might have begged a little) to come over and share with us his knowledge based on the years that he has been implementing them with teachers that he works with. Thank you, Dr. Bennett, for taking time not only to share this knowledge with me but also with my readers!

What are Number Talks?

Number talks are a highly effective way to help students learn to communicate mathematically, attend to the nuances in strategies, and develop fluency. Essentially, students have opportunities to learn to think and behave like a mathematician, which is central to their short-term and long-term growth in mathematics.

Number talks are often short, five to ten minute, whole-class moments wherein students mentally calculate solutions to computational exercises to develop flexibility in thinking and reasoning. Students then discuss their ideas, attending to the “why” instead of just “how.” The teacher records the student’s thinking in a non-evaluative manner, probing for clarification if specific steps or decisions are unclear. While number talks have tremendous potential to support procedural and conceptual understanding, implementing number talks in the middle grades can be more challenging as the content becomes more advanced and does not always lend itself to simple calculations or computations.

Transitioning Number Talks for Middle School Students

However, most of the benefits of number talks—which include such things as making sense of mathematical contexts or situations, recognizing key elements in relationships, learning to reason about why these key elements matter, and practicing how to listen to their fellow students’ ideas as well as articulate understandings in a clear and logical manner—can still happen by attending to reasoning. Thus, Reasoning Talks might be a better way to describe the nature of number talks in the middle grades.

Reasoning talks can look different and can have different outcomes. For example, a teacher might want students to recognize what is important about a problem/context. Do students understand what matters and how it matters? Or, students might be asked to make meaning of a symbolic representation. When examining a proportion, what do the two ratios mean independently and in relation to each other? Additionally, students might be asked to make connections between relationships. An example of this might include analyzing what is the same or different between a linear and non-linear function who have the same (or different) coefficients and y-intercepts. Other Reasoning Talks might focus on generating a possible solution pathway, developing questions, or developing a conjecture or considering a counter argument.

Implementing Reasoning Talks

As with any strategy that you try, this will take more time than you think it will (or want it to) at first but it will become easier to implement as you become more familiar with it. Also, the underlying success of Reasoning Talks goes beyond just deliberate practice, it begins with deliberate practice. Your planning matters tremendously here. My suggestion is to begin with answering the following questions first (see FREEBIE template for additional structure):

What should they be considering in the task you provide?
How do you want them to consider this task or what do you want them to focus on?
What mathematics will be involved or be the focus?
And what questions will you ask to probe for clarity?

Just as with number talks, Reasoning Talks aim to help students learn to communicate ideas and attend to critical aspects of the mathematics they are learning. This means one of the more critical roles of the teacher is keeping track of ideas in a central place (like on the white board), helping students attend to the key aspects of their thinking (they are not always aware of the importance of their ideas), and helping them make connections between their ideas and the ideas of others. In your practice, remember to attend to these three things and perhaps even add notes to yourself on the planning template to help you keep this focus. Otherwise, you may end up completing a Reasoning Talk and feel unsure your outcomes were accomplished.

And to Wrap Up…

Ultimately, Reasoning Talks are about students learning to think and behave like a mathematician. This takes time and practice and you may not ever get your students where you want them to be with this but they will be in a better place than before you started (next year’s teacher will be grateful for your work!). Also, be patient with yourself. Helping students learn to be sense makers and reason about mathematics is not easy but it is worth your time and effort. Perhaps the best advice I can give for those just starting out is to start small, work with others, and tap into professional communities that are willing to support your efforts. This school year may be winding down but it is not too late to start thinking about how you are going to start this work next year.

So, how could we (Cory and Jennifer) help you with Number Talks in your Middle Grades classroom? What are you looking for? What do you need more information about? Answer us in the comments below because rumor has it, we ARE listening!

Contact Information for Cory

Email: bennett.educational.consulting@gmail.com

Twitter: @Alohacory

Website: www.bennettconsulting.education