Piloting

I'm curious where your district (or site) is with piloting math materials for your district/school with the intention of adopting?

I'm fortunate to be able to compare three different surrounding districts: my wife's, my sister's and my own. I'm not here to say which is best or to say that any district's process is better than the other. Furthermore, as I state questions, I'm not implying that any of the aforementioned districts are sufficient or insufficient, competent or incompetent, correct or incorrect.

Therefore, here's something I'm wondering when a district pilots a math program:

Are teachers given a comprehensive list of metrics regarding the effectiveness of piloting a math program in their classroom?

For example, are teachers asked to pay attention to any of the following (and more)?

• How are lesson objectives structured?
• How are content standards unpacked?
• How are lessons/activities launched?
• What's the level of student engagement?
• What are students doing during the lesson/activity?
• What are teachers doing during the lesson/activity?
• What conclusion do students make at the end of the lesson/activity?
• Is the practice (homework/classwork) effective and meaningful?
• Are the assessments a fair representation of the lesson objectives and content standards?
• What's the distribution of application, procedural, and conceptual understanding mixed with problem-solving or performance activities?
• How applicable are the statistics and probability standards in your grade level and are they imbedded in the other grade level content standards?

If a veteran teacher and first-year teacher are both piloting the same program, how can they both objectively measure the quality of a pilot?

How is any teacher expected to give meaningful feedback to their district if they're not given direction ahead of time?

I've noticed that districts are giving their teachers a chance to voice their opinion on the pilot program, but if there's no common metric, how does one make it a fair comparison?

Again, I'm not saying that my district, my wife's district, or my sister's district have the math adoption process right or wrong. I'm curious if it makes sense for any district to front-load their teachers with ways to measure the effectiveness of a program.

Thankfully, I've noticed the most patient participants (or bystanders) in this transition (including adoption) are the students. Be sure to thank them for their patience and perseverance as we work hard to do our best getting it right. How long will that patience last?

Pilot,
946

P.S. Chris Hunter shared a very thorough post by our NCTM president.

Using Google Forms and Sheets

If you've ever used Estimation 180, you'll notice there's a Google Form on each day where anyone in the world can input their estimate. Although it's not what I envisioned when initially designing the site, it has served a purpose. And it's free. So until I have a million dollars or someone is willing to donate a bunch of money to Estimation 180 so there can be a classroom type interface like teacher.desmos.com or Pear Deck, the Google forms will have to do for now.

My suggestion: create your own form so that you can capture rich data from your students. I believe it's so important that we capture, sort, assess, and discuss student thinking. I put together three short screencasts on:

1. Suggestions for using your own Google Form with students.
2. How to make the Google Form in video 1.
3. How to sort and use the data in the Google Sheet. 

Part 1: The finished form

• Form fields and parameters
• Daily pic in the form

Part 2: Creating and setting up the form

• Text fields and advanced settings
• Insert the image URL into the form
• Creating sentence starters
• Using a shortened URL

Part 3: Sorting the data in a Google Sheet

• Using Add-ons, specifically rowCall to separate class periods into their own sheets
• Conditional Formatting
• Finding the average (and more) of a column

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions to make the work flow more efficient.

If you're headed to CUE 2015 in Palm Springs, come check out one of my two sessions where I'll use Google Forms and Sheets to capture, sort, assess, and discuss the rich thinking and data you can receive from students.

Forms,
216

@Estimation180 tweets

Why on earth would I need an additional Twitter handle (account)? I probably don't. However, it just felt right. It was time. Let me break it down:

@mr_stadel tweets will continue to be all things math and make-fun-of-Fawn.

@Estimation180 tweets will capture and share my daily estimation curiosities.

Estimation 180, the site, is a place where students and teachers can have meaningful conversations revolving around number sense. It's mainly structured around themes so teachers and students build number sense using the information from previous days or personal experiences. There's a visual introduction, a simple question, a visual payoff, and reasoning along the way. In preparing the Estimation 180 challenges for the site, many of them are brainstormed, planned, captured, and presented so they are accessible in a classroom.

As for the @Estimation180 Twitter account, I'm capturing a daily estimation curiosity, be it thoughts and/or visuals. Each day, I'll use my estimation radar to look for something I'm curious about. I'll do my best to share a visual when possible. Furthermore, I look forward to posing as many questions as 140 characters will allow. These questions can be just as important as the visual. If not more! There won't necessarily be a visual answer (payoff), but it never hurts to try. This Twitter account allows me to freely view the world in a curious way with minimal restraints.

Thanks for following me at either handle or both.
Thanks for your inspiration.
Thanks for your feedback.
Thanks for your patience as I discipline myself to look for daily estimation curiosities and share them via Twitter at @Estimation180.

Here's the first tweet:

What time of day is it? How long to go a mile? How many vehicles in a mile? How many red lights? #estimation180 pic.twitter.com/RvmwRD4A5U
— Estimation 180 (@Estimation180) January 24, 2015

@Estimation180,
933

The embed code for @Estimation180 feed (if you're interested):
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