Video of Student Interviews

Jo interviewed a range of students from age 7 to 10 and asked them about their experiences with maths and the school’s approach.

Assessment

This is an extract from Jo’s new book (Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live without Barriers, Harper Collins-2019) describing the assessment changes made at the school:

The teachers at the school realized something important – that it is hard to tell students that mistakes are really useful for learning, but then penalize them in tests for every mistake they make. Mark captured the effect of such testing when he said: “Here’s a question, it’s out of 20, you already start with 20 but the second your pencil touches paper and a mistake is made, all you see is you lost a mark. The anxiety builds and the learning stops because it’s too late to do anything about it…and it just becomes about the mark.” The teachers still assess students but instead of giving an unhelpful number, and penalizing mistakes, they give what I often describe as the greatest gift teachers can give students – diagnostic comments on ways to improve, based on a leveled rubric. Mark said that at first the students looked for a number and that was all they cared about, which is often the result of a performance culture, (rather than a learning culture). But now students see the rubric, they understand where they are in their learning, and they read the teacher’s comments to know how to improve. This change in assessment is the ultimate way to share with students the message that growth and learning is what you value, and that you can help them improve with guidance. (Boaler, 2019)

Example Rubrics

Thank you to the following teachers from St. Alphonsa for sharing their rubric samples with us: Magda Wajzer, Chana Sousa, Maria Castrucci, Shawn Evon, Noralee Yarra, Jackie Crowley, Natalie Pileggi, Megan Venditti.

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Life Academy is a public school in Oakland that is committed to disrupting patterns of inequity on a daily basis. Life Academy is ethnically diverse, currently the demographics are:

• 74% Latino/a/Hispanic
• 11% African-American
• 1% Asian
• 2% Filipino
• 1% Native American
• 1% White

Ninety-two per cent of students are eligible for free school lunch.

The school is located in a part of Oakland in which gang activities and murders are distressingly commonplace. The teachers at Life Academy work hard to make the school a safe space, to communicate to all students that they can achieve at the highest levels, and to inspire them to identify as college-bound students. The mathematics teachers teach heterogeneous maths classes using complex instruction, making sure that all students can take the high-level maths classes that they need for college eligibility. The accomplishments of Life Academy are many:

The school has the highest college acceptance rate of any high school in Oakland, and the proportion of students who leave meeting California’s A-G college entrance requirements is an impressive 87%.

We are sharing a classroom video and interview with Life Academy teachers in hopes that you find them as informative and inspiring as we do.

Groupwork with Ms. Torres

Ana Torres is a middle school maths teacher and graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education program. At the time this video was filmed she was in her second year of teaching at Life Academy.

We join Ana Torres’ sixth grade class in late spring. The unit they are on is focused on making sense of volume and surface area of different sized prisms using multiple strategies.

The students are sitting in groups of four working on this Dark Green Rod challenge:

Takeout a dark green rod. Your team’s job is to design and make (using cm paper) a rod that looks exactly like the dark green but it is three times bigger. Here is the student handout used in the class:

Dark Green Rod Task

The extract of class we are sharing here is the second day of the Dark Green Rod challenge. On day one groups created three-dimensional models using centimeter square paper of the enlarged green rod. Now they are sharing how they found the surface area and volume of the enlarged green rod with Ms. Torres before starting their individual write-up.

There are four out of six groups in the class showcased in the video. We see them making mistakes, building with Cuisenaire rods, discussing different ways of seeing, confusing volume and surface area, being visual in their explanation of methods, and comparing methods.

Ms. Torres has set up groups to share with her by giving each student turns to explain their strategy for finding the volume. This is a common structure she uses to promote equitable groupwork. To read more about the principles behind the teacher’s practices see the Group Work section of the our website.

The following interview is very illuminating in understanding why the school has such success. The interview is with two of the mathematics teachers who are at Life Academy.

Jane and Carlos Interview

Jane Lee is a graduate from the Stanford Teacher Education program in her third year of teaching high school at Life Academy when this interview took place.

Carlos Cabana has been teaching since 1990. He has taught both high school and middle school. At Life Academy he returned to his passion of teaching middle school students. He has spent his career striving to help all students to be successful in mathematics. In the interview we hear about the important messages the teachers communicate to their students about mathematics and learning mathematics.

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Pennies and Paperclips is a two-player game played on a 4 by 4 checkerboard with a standard color pattern. One player, “Penny”, gets two pennies as her pieces. The other player, “Clip”, gets a pile of paperclips as his pieces. Penny places her two pennies on any two different squares on the board. Once the pennies are placed, Clip attempts to cover the remainder of the board with paperclips — with each paperclip being required to cover two adjacent squares. Paperclips are not allowed to overlap. If the remainder of the board can be covered with paperclips then Clip is declared the winner. If the remainder of the board cannot be covered with paperclips then Penny is the winner.

For more information on the problem visit: https://www.artofmathematics.org/blogs/jfleron/pennies-paperclip-proofs

4 minute version of the video:

8 minute version of the video:

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