A Recitation Breakthrough

Since this is the first post I'm writing, I feel like I should say that I've decided to start this blog as a way of keeping notes about my teaching experiences. What really inspired me to sit down on a Friday evening and type was a truly great breakthrough I had in class today.

This semester, I've been teaching two recitation sections of Calculus I. This is the first semester I've ever taught recitation, and it's been a very different experience than being instructor of record. For the first time in my five years of teaching college-level math, I've had issues with student behavior and classroom management. The issues stem from the diverse group of learners present in my classroom. Some students are retaking Calculus I for an easy A after doing well in AP Calculus last year. Some students are in Calculus for the first time. Some students are struggling with material but have a hard time letting me know that. And some students are having attendance issues in lecture and come to class unprepared for group work. I was at a loss for what to do. 

Since I'm also close to graduating, I've been testing the waters of the job market. One day while doing a search on Indeed, I came across the Modern Classrooms Project. I checked out their website, and I liked what they had to say. Their pedagogical model rests on four main pillars:

1. Self-Paced Structures

2. Blended Learning

3. Differentiated Instruction

4. Mastery-Based Assessment

I'm usually leery of fad-like education ideas, but this one really spoke to me, as the reasoning for their focus is that every student comes (or doesn't come) to class at varying levels of preparedness. 

So, for about a week while sipping tea over breakfast, I took their free online course. While it's aimed at K-12 classrooms, I think a lot of the ideas posited transfer to the university learning environment. The one that resonated the most with me was seeing teachers' classrooms where the students were doing work according to what they were prepared to do. The room was chaotic; students around the room were working on five or six different things at once, but they were also under control. Now, you're probably thinking "Ok, of course they all looked happy because the foundation is trying to sell their mission", but the reasoning behind how the classroom was managed just made sense. 

This semester, we've been recording lectures and posting them to the class Canvas page, and the more I thought about it, it seemed like managing a recitation classroom in this way was definitely plausible. Today was the first recitation of Unit 3, and I designed the Group Problem Solving activity around Related Rates problems. After debriefing with the class about the test they took a couple of days ago, I instructed them to form their groups according to how they felt about the Word Problem example from lecture yesterday. These were as follows:

1. People who didn't attend lecture yesterday

2. People who went to lecture, but didn't do the pre-recitation problems

3. People who did the pre-recitation problems and 

   • felt confused about the word problem example

   • felt so-so about the word problem example

   • felt good about the word problem example

Group 1's job was to watch the lecture recording, take notes, and start the pre-recitation prep, Group 2's job was to do the pre-recitation prep and start the problem set, and Group 3's job was to start at varying points of the problem set. The problem set was comprised of 6 related rates problems on a difficulty scale from oil puddle to clock problem (If you've taught Calc I, this is a classic). 

The outcome was astounding. All 30 students in each class were engaged and on-task the for the entire 50 minutes. Students were asking me questions. No one was bored. It was literally the best recitation session I've had all semester. 

So, what did I take away from this experiment? It will definitely need replicating, and I plan to write the upcoming lessons in a similar fashion, but for a first try, I am definitely convinced that there's something to the idea of not forcing every student to work on the same thing at the same time. I mean, when you think about it, what's the point of making a student work through a problem set when they haven't had the proper scaffolding from the pre-recitation problems or maybe not even had any instruction from lecture. It seems kind of stupid to make them do something they're not prepared for.

Anyway, I would recommend checking out the Modern Classrooms Project's website. I'm not promoting that you become a steadfastly committed member or anything, but their free course is definitely thought-provoking and worth a listen.