SBG is going to be much better this year

I've just graded my first SBG quiz this year, I think I have made some big improvements. The first is using a nice rubric, I like this one I found on Sam Shah's site.  Last year, I was doing a hybrid of taking off points like I used to and SBG.  It was okay, but it wasn't great.  I think a clear rubric of how I define mastery will result in a much better conversation between the students and myself and a clearer path to learning for them.

We have changed our Common Core Algebra 1 class slightly, so I changed the list of standards, click here for the new one.

Each standard appears in class three times over three consecutive weeks, if they want to retake it after that, they need to submit a Google form which alerts me with an email.  This form shows me which of the retake requirements they have chosen.

Most of these items can be found on my Practice by Standard page, shown here

Second year of Common Core Algebra 1

Our department modified our Algebra 1 curriculum last year for the common core. This will be our second year of this course and we decided to remove the statistics unit. We have decided to offer one Prob and Stats course that covers all of the CCSSM standards rather than address them in little bits over our entire math curriculum. This frees up some time in our Alg 1 class, we would like to use this time to do a better job with the mathematical practices. We will be doing a section on math patterns at the beginning of our functions unit, this will build a stronger conceptual understanding of what a graphed equation is describing. We will also do absolute value graphing using translations and introduce the vertex form of quadratic equations. Both of these sections should helps students with the kind of translational thinking that will be at the heart of the new CCSSM Geometry course we are teaching for the first time this year. I have modified the Alg 1 book to make the stats unit an appendix and I have added a unit on patterns and translational graphing of absolute value.

Algebra 1 EHS 2014-2015, no Stats

Warm Ups

I've seen some conversation about warm ups in other recent blogs, I use Kuta software to generate multiple choice worksheets and use clickers in self paced mode. The students do the worksheets and put in their answers while I'm checking hwk, handing back papers, etc. I do most problems from recent work, but I will be spiraling in problems from older lessons, as inspired by Kathryn's session at TMC14. I review the results of each question (histogram, not individual students) with the students immediately after they are done. This is valuable formative assessment and the recording of results helps the students to take it seriously. I plan to start working in more open ended question warm ups (Math Arguments180, etc) as the year moves on.