Starting to Organize Data

Today, I gave the students access to the raw data. Wow - it was interesting how they started sifting through the information. This was the most challenging day for me in terms of stepping back and letting them develop ways to organize the data on their own. I wanted to shout "Just make a tally chart!" but watched as students made lists, developed their own codes, highlight and colour information, and discuss unexpected results ("Wow - this kid took 25 seconds for the reaction time question! I wonder why?"). I did see some students making tallies, using tables to organize their data, and even calculating the mean and median of their data (well they were figuring out a way to do this anyway). After about 15 minutes, I let the class know that they were allowed to walk around and check out how other groups are organizing their data and could ask questions to these other students if needed.

Below is a vine of today's exploration:

We didn't have any technology available today (so much for "leveraging digital"!) but in a sense I found the students were able to focus on the data and organization methods as opposed to worrying about formatting and tech issues. I ended up handing out a pocket portfolio to each group for them to store all of their work.

It was certainly an interesting experience. I didn't realize that "teacher-directed" was such an integral part of my teaching approaches. This is one more step towards letting my students direct their learning (moving from lecturer to facilitator).

I am sort of wondering where to go from this point... is it time for some student sharing, establishing co-constructed anchor charts, and some additional teacher prompting... or do I give it some more time and see what the students do? Tomorrow we have about 30 minutes to keep working through the data but I will give each group a Chromebook and a link to the data to see how they use the technology to help sift through. 

Choosing a Big Idea or Questions from the data

As a precursor to introducing the project and the survey data, I shared the results of a "getting to know you survey" that I had conducted the first week of school. Find the survey results HERE.

I had students look through the data and post their "wonderings" on a padlet (see below). Some of the questions were based on the data and some used the ideas in the data to spur new questions. 

We had a great discussion on how we can create questions without bias and, more importantly, if the questions may serve a purpose (other than mere curiosity). Following our conversation, I shared a PDF of the census at schools survey questions and had them post their wonderings on a new padlet. Some students came up with some intriguing questions to explore (e.g. does gender affect reaction time) and some were drawing blanks. I had the list of what I considered the more "meaty" survey questions (see previous post) to help prompt. 

The following is a list of student-generated questions (or big ideas) that they will be digging into over the next weeks. 

• Does geography (where we are born) affect the colour of our eyes?
• Does it take a shorter amount of time to get to school in 2014 then it did 10 years ago?
• Are more elementary kids choosing online communication (as opposed to person-to-person) to interact with their friends?
• Exploring local (St. Gabriel) and national opinions about why people bully.
• Does geography affect your height? Comparing heights of 10-year old boys in Canada, UK, and Japan.
• The languages we speak: is Canada really a bilingual nation?
• Are water bottles losing popularity?
• Dog or cat – which is the more popular pet?
• The popularity of Math (music, English) over the years
• In which season are the most babies born?
• How important is internet connectivity to elementary students?
• Investigating the effect of handedness and gender on reaction time.
• Do our breakfast choices follow the Canada Food Guide?
• Are Canadian girls taller than other girls around the world?
• Has the amount of Canadian children with allergies increased over the past 10 years?

Some students want to compare our school data to Canadian data. Some want to look at Canadian data over time, and some want to compare school data to international data. Some students are working independently and some are working in pairs (we have one group of 3).

Tomorrow, students will be developing their objective statements (basically a more detailed version of their question) and will be predicting what the data may look like for our school, Canada, and (if necessary) other countries. I plan to share the census at schools data with them on Monday.

Just as an aside, I am not formally teaching anything "data management" related leading up to this project. I want to see which learning objectives and big ideas the students will stumble across via their own learning. I will be tracking this as I observe it. Never having taught with this degree of student-centredness, I am finding it a bit frightening and liberating at the same time!

How is everyone else doing?

Introducing the Project to the Students

Today, I met with the other grade 5 teachers at my school. We are all completing the Census at School task. So far we have collected data from 58 grade five students at our school. We decided as a team that this is enough data and we do not need to track down those students (there are about 10 of them) who have yet to fill out the survey.

On Wednesday, we will be introducing the project to all of the grade fives. We discussed that we would start by re-visiting the survey questions (a PDF of the questions can be found HERE). We want students to explore a question, or combination of questions, that interests them. Saying that, we are anticipating that for some students, this may be too open-ended. We have created a list of possible questions that we will make available to students unable to determine a suitable exploration question on their own.

The list includes the following (dates refer to the year in which that question was added to the survey):

• In how many languages can you hold an everyday conversation? (2007)
• Do you have allergies?  (2004)
• Right-handed, left-handed or ambidextrous? (2005)
• What do you usually eat for breakfast? (2005)
• Why do you think some kids bully others? (2009)
• Which method do you use most often to communicate with friends? (2007)
• Primarily what type of water do you drink at home? (2007)
• Importance of Environmental Initiatives (2007)
• Importance of Technology (2007)

• What colour are your eyes?  (2003)
• How do you usually travel to school? (2004)
• How long does it usually take you to travel to school? (2003)
• What is your favourite subject? (2006)
• If you had $1,000 to donate to charity, what type of organization would you choose? (2005)
• Whom do you look up to? (2003)
• How many people usually live in your household? (2007)
• Which of the following pets do you have? (2004)

Students will be tasked with determining a question (either one from the survey or one they come up with based on the survey questions), explaining why they chose those questions, and make predictions (with supporting details) regarding the data for our school’s grade five population (sample size = 58). Once they have written their objectives and predictions, we will provide them a link to the school data.

The school data will be given in the form of a link to a viewable Google doc. Students can make a copy of the doc in order to manipulate it in their own Google drive. From here, teachers will be observing how the students use the data to fulfil their objectives. As all grade 5 students will be completing the project, we will be having students with similar questions conference together (our goal here is to explore the “Collaborative knowledge construction” dimension of the Critical Thinking competency).

This is just the initial launch. All of us here at St. Gabriel are excited to see how the students decide to use the data, collect the data, organize the data, and interpret the data. There are many directions that they could go and we are cognizant to allow the students to take the lead. Wish us luck!

Growth Mindset

When we look at new pedagogies and deeper learning goals across whole education systems, we look at growth mindset. What skills will our students need to leave us with? How are we instilling those skills in our students?

According to many researchers (Hindle, Hattie), having a Growth Mindset (specifically in math but not limited to math) is an approach to teaching mathematics which believes that mindset is more important than initial ability in determining the progress made by students in their mathematical understanding. 

Students with a growth mindset:

• Believe that talents can be developed and great abilities can be built over time 
• View mistakes as an opportunity to develop 
• Are resilient 
• Believe that effort creates success 
• Think about how they learn 

Students with a fixed mindset:

• Believe that talent alone creates success 
• Are reluctant to take on challenges 
• Prefer to stay in their comfort zone 
• Are fearful of making mistakes 
• Think it is important to 'look smart' in front of others 
• Believe that talents and abilities are set in stone, you either have them or you don't 

As a team we have chosen to look at growth mindset specifically around the area of math. Marilyn Kasian has shared her growth mindset student survey with our team in order for us to capture some data around growth mindset. We have decided to administer this survey to each of our students at the beginning of our learning with data management and will administer again at the end of the unit to see if and how students thinking around mindset and math has changed based on their experiences. The following is the student survey that all participating students will complete around growth mindset in math.

Completing the Survey

My students had completed the measurement previously (I highly recommend using the measurement signs and recording paper) so that they could complete the survey today. Overall, the survey was easy to access (although I would suggest using Chromebooks and not iPads as some of the questions (reaction time, memory game, and the sliding scales) are not as compatible with tablets.

I had "completing the census survey" as one of the things students could be working on today with the hope that with limited technology, students would be able to rotate through. Two things I learned about the survey:

1. It takes longer than I thought it would - allow for about 10 minutes per student
2. I wish I would have had the students go through a paper copy beforehand.

If I were to go back in time, I would have taken more time to have the students critic each question for bias and possible confusing or misleading information. There is a video (find it HERE) that student could watch if they need support. I liked the idea of having students rotate in when they had time, but students did have questions and problems completing the survey that probably could have been solved beforehand.

Two of the three classes at my school have completed the survey. The third class will be completing it next week. We should have 75-80 points of data for the grade 5 students at our school. 

First Day - planning as a team

Today we met as a team - principal, superintendent, classroom teachers, and learning connection partners. Our main goal was to choose which of the six competencies - character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity, or critical thinking - our team would be focusing on over the next few months. As the school focus was on math, we decided to dig into the critical thinking competency.

The dimensions covered in this learning progression include:

• evaluating information and arguments
• making connections and identifying patterns
• meaningful knowledge construction
• experimenting, reflecting and taking action on their ideas in the real world
• collaborative knowledge construction
• leveraging digital

Our team is looking at using Census at School as a starting point for the collection of data. We plan to divide into primary and junior teams and document our journey using this blog. 

We are hoping to connect the schools to share data and collaborate to analyse the data. We are all looking forward to the partnership and this journey.