I keep wondering what a “Basketball Math” curriculum might look like for Tucker, one that would combine his serious interest in the sport with his growing interest in math.
Choose one:
Justify your answer. I’ll post a solution key next week.
I’m the guest on Classroom 2.0’s webcast tomorrow, 11/6, at 9:00AM Pacific / 12:00PM Eastern. I’ll be running through a lot of new material, including a new WCYDWT problem I’m really proud of, and all of the above could benefit from your criticism. So bring the heat. I hope to see you there.
BTW: If you’d like to watch it online, Blip.TV has you covered. If you’d like to watch it on your iThing, iTunes has you covered.
[BTW: I updated the SBG prompts below with some answers from the comments.]
In addition to the material I facilitated on instructional design, the staff at Colchester High School wanted to work on their implementation of standards-based grading. Happily, they had already agreed on the fundamentals:
This left me all the creative, interesting parts. We talked about reporting methods for keeping students apprised of their progress, both individually and as a class. We talked about the effect of SBG on retention. Then we picked a concept and had pairs come up with a score of 1, 2, and 3.
We debated productively about marginal scores – when a 2 turns into a 3, specifically – and concluded that, in a system this forgiving, we’d rather underestimate a student (who could return to improve her score whenever, wherever) than overestimate her.
We discussed, afterwards, how to construct valid, manageable assessments. I gave them four test questions, each of which, in its own way, invalidated what it claimed to measure or was unmanageable at scale. I’ll leave them here. Feel free to kick them around in the comments.
Alex:
The trouble with the two-step equation problem is that it’s also an intimidating decimal arithmetic question. If a student fails it, you don’t know which skill needs work.
The issue with the Law of Sines / Cosines problem is that you do not have to use the Law of Sines / Cosines to solve it. A student can get those right WITHOUT using the Law of Sines / Cosines, especially the 30-60-90.
Also, the concept is too broad. If a student has a 2/4 on “Law of Sines / Cosines,” how do you know which one to remediate?
“Quadrilaterals” is also too broad a concept. If a student has a 3/4 on “Quadrilaterals,” do you know what the student knows about quadrilaterals? Which ones she understands and doesn’t?
We decided “Linear Pairs of Angles” is too small a concept. If every concept were this granular, we’d have several hundred concepts to manage by semester’s end.
My work at Google last year just shipped. Four of us wrapped our heads around “computational thinking,” an approach to problem solving common to computer programmers (more here), and tried to adapt it to the California high school math and science standards. This felt, at times, like tying Al Roker and Usain Bolt together at the ankle and forcing them to compete in a three-legged race. Other times, they played well together.
Near as I can tell, of the sixty-or-so modules listed, only one of them – “Roots of an Equation” – is mine. I always admired Google’s lack of sentiment in deciding when to invest itself and when to divest itself. Still it’s strange to see a year of work reduced to a single entry in a long list. I’ll be interested to see where the project goes from here.