Procedures

Procedures Video

Procedures are a critical component of ensuring students have consistency, understand how our routines work and translate into efficiency within the classroom. According to Harry Wong’s theory of classroom management, “Ineffective teachers begin the first day of school attempting to teach a subject and spend the rest of the school year running after the students. Effective teachers spend most of the first two weeks of the school year teaching students to follow classroom procedures” (The First Days of School). Therefore, I spent a lot of time teaching students effective turn and talk procedures, using agree/disagree signals, calling attention from a count down from 5, and silent signals (for the bathroom, drink of water, tissue, and pencil) the first few weeks of school. This video shows how these procedures have culminated after two months of repetition. According to Harry Wong’s research in effective classroom management, teachers should use a three-step approach for teaching classroom procedures. This includes explaining, rehearsing, and reinforcing (repetition) until students have it be a habit or routine (The First Days of School). Therefore, this video shows this in practice after being on stage three of his approach.

During morning meeting, students have incorporated 4 main procedures. First, students do a turn and talk. When this was first taught, I held students accountable to turning their bodies, facing their partners, looking them in the eye, and talking to them in order to teach social skills. Second, I wanted to ensure students were talking about the topic and not something completely off topic. This was modeled by showing that we can ask questions about the topic that might get us off topic but we cannot talk about anything completely off topic. The video shows that the majority of the class is doing this. At 1:20 you can see the girls in the front turning their bodies and engaging in conversation and the boys in the back turning their bodies and talking. However, three of the boys in the back of the room were not facing each other but still engaging in a conversation. I think for the small percentage of my class who need to work on the actions of the procedure, I will need to work on Wong’s second step of rehearsing under my supervision. The other part of the turn and talk (ensuring students are talking about the topic) is an area I still need to work on. When I am engaging in a turn and talk with students, it is difficult for me to be sure that 100% of students are on topic. Therefore, a strategy I might use for next time during the share is to have students share what their partner said so they are listening to each other and staying on topic.

The second procedure I implemented from the first day is an attention getter. I do a countdown from 5 to get students’ attention. The expectation is that by the time I reach 1, all students have their voices off, their bodies are frozen, and eyes are on me. At 2:45 you can see me doing the countdown. As I start on 5, students are already turning their bodies to face me, their voices are turning off, and their bodies are frozen. As I continue to talk some students are looking elsewhere but may still be engaged in what I am saying. I anticipate this being in Wong’s third step of reinforcing. Keeping eye contact with the speaker even after the countdown from 5 is important to show listening skills. Therefore, it is something I will continue to reteach, rehearse, and practice until it becomes routine. In order to reteach “eyes on me” I can connect a lesson we have already done in Second-Step about what active listening looks like to how students are showing me that they are listening with eye contact. I can have an accountability slip where they check-mark the amount of times a day they are not only keeping their eyes on me, but their eyes on a speaker in general.

The third procedure this video highlighted is using agree/disagree signals. Rather than yelling out that something excited them or they don’t like a certain food, students are encouraged to use silent signals. This also shows that they are actively listening since they have to form opinions based on what someone else said. Around 2:50 you can see me prepping the class to use silent signals when others are sharing. At the beginning, the majority of the students were doing the silent signal. Near the end, nearly no one was doing it anymore. Silent signals is in stage two of Wong’s three step approach for teaching classroom procedures. It is a procedure that needs to be rehearsed and practiced underneath my supervision. Students still need to be reminded to use it (2:50) and 100% of students are not consistently using it. In order to revise this procedure, I will continue to remind students to use silent signals at the beginning of something I want them to be actively listening to. In the beginning, if I don’t see 100% of students showing a silent signal, I will have the class retry the procedure until it becomes innate to doing it. I can also use an accountability buddy system by assigning each student a buddy and that buddy is responsible for making sure their partner is giving a silent signal.

The last procedure that was slightly evident in the video was silent hand signals for important things that might be common throughout the day (bathroom, water, tissue, and pencil). At 1:41 you can see the student is turning and talking to me give a two fingers crossed sign to me even though he is talking to me. He knew to use a silent signal to ask me to go to the bathroom rather than saying it outloud. While this video shows limited evidence of this procedure, it is something I continually work on throughout the day. 60% of my class is able to use the silent signals and patiently wait until I give them a nod yes or no for what they need. There is still 40% of the class that is in stage two of rehearsing and part of stage one of explaining. To reteach this procedure with 40% of those students, I will explain why we use silent signals (provides a flow in the classroom, no interruptions, and efficiency). Once they understand, every time they verbally ask me to do one of those procedures I will not respond until they show me a silent signal. That way, under my supervision (phase two/rehearse) it will eventually become routine.

Analyzing Student Learning

Student Work (ignore the number line on the bottom, that is part of the second question not analyzed with this learning objective and data)

The rubric provides a guideline for categorizing student mastery. If students scored a 4, they were able to correctly order all 5 fractions from least to greatest and show correct reasoning through a strategy that they were comfortable using. If students scored a 3 it could mean two things. Either students misplaced one fraction (but knew how to correctly order all the other fractions from least to greatest) or students correctly ordered 3 fractions but mixed up the other 2 fractions. If students scored a 2 it meant that they could only correctly order two of the fractions but mixed up the other three fractions and could not put them in the correct order in relation to the other three fractions. If students scored a 1 it meant that they could possibly identify the largest or smallest fraction but could not order the rest of the fractions or they could not correctly order any of the fractions.

The data shows that over half the class is correctly able to show a strategy to order all 5 of the fractions from least to greatest. Looking at Andy’s work which is very similar to the other students who scored a 4 on the rubric, they understood three big ideas that helped them place the fractions in correct order. First, looking at Andy’s work, he knows that whenever you have 1 out of a certain number  (such as ¼), it will be less than only having one left (such as ⅞). Therefore, he knew that ¼ and ⅕ had to come before ⅞ and 8/9. Second, he understood that fourths were larger than than fifths so when you eat 1 out of 5 pieces, you are eating a smaller amount. That thinking is shown through his visual representation when he adds dotted lines to the fifths representation to turn it into fourths and writes “smaller” to show that a fifth is smaller than a fourth. Third, he was able to successfully convert the improper fraction into a mixed number and then understand that half is bigger than the fifth and fourth but less than the ⅞ and 8/9. Both the data and student work show that over half of the class is able to do these three items to show their thinking.

When looking at the data, it looks like at first glance 18% of the class is having trouble with ordering one or two fractions. However, when looking closer at student work, there is a consistent misconception. Students did not understand how to convert an improper fraction into a mixed number or didn’t understand what the improper fraction meant. All of the students made the same error and had the same misconception that 39/6 was the largest because of the 39 on the top. This can be seen in Maggie’s work. To clarify this misunderstanding, I will have these students draw out what 39 sixths looks like with pre-drawn bars cut into six pieces to save time. This will translate into understanding that this fraction really represents 6 and 3/6 and is not the largest number when compared to the other drawings.

Last, when looking at the data that shows rubric scores at a 1, it looks like over 20% of students cannot order fractions at all. However, when digging deeper nearly all the students had a conceptual understanding of whether ¼ vs. ⅕ was larger and ⅞ vs. 8/9 using the same reasoning as above. However, when it came to comparing ¼ and ⅕ to ⅞ and 8/9 students did not know which one should go first or last. They did not have an understanding that ⅞ and 8/9 is closer to one whole so it is larger than ¼ and ⅕ which is just one piece out of a whole. They also did not have an understanding what 39/6 represented. Most of them placed this fraction in random spots but nearly all of them consistently put ¼ after ⅕ and 8/9 after ⅞. To address this common error I will have students draw out each of the fractions to visually see the difference between taking only one piece out of a whole vs. only having one piece left. You can see in Irvin’s work that he was not making connections across the fractions but just for the fractions that look similar (¼ and ⅕   ⅞ and 8/9). Another strategy is to use paper strips to have students engage with the fractions in a hands on way to see what each of the fractions look like. I would have these students draw out 39 sixths as well, similar to the group of students scoring a 3 from the rubric. After the visual representations, for the group scoring a 3 on the rubric, I will hand out two student copies of correctly placing a different improper fraction in order and one that incorrectly places it. I will have students work in pairs to justify which paper was correct and which paper was incorrect. I will do the same for the group scoring 1’s on the rubric but orient it more towards misplacing the 1 out of a number and having only one piece left out of a whole.

The last noticing from the data was that 2 of my ESL students who scored a 1 on the rubric scored a 1 due to placing the fractions from greatest to least (in addition to not knowing what to do with the 39/6). These students might need additional support with language of “greatest” and “least” to understand how to order in that direction.