Glen posed the following question: What do you require from your middle and high school students in terms of journals and portfolios and how do you implement them into the middle school and high school math class for students.
I'll be perfectly honest and admit that I have not made use of either of these. The main reason is that I have not taught a class for enough consecutive years to develop either as a component in my class.
Not to play my grandfather's role and tell his grandkids to "do as I say, not as I do" but both are an excellent idea. These are activities/products I need to make use of and likely will in special education. The following is my explanation of why they are very good ideas.
Words and language are means to communicate ideas. As I mentioned on Jan 23, by explaining a concept, a deeper understanding is required. By having students write explanations for concepts, they communicate by analyzing and justifying - higher Bloom's levels. A journal in math can be a collection of prompts requiring an explanation. For example, it could consist of different open-ended CAPT or CMT prompts in which students must write an explanation for their answer.
Similarly, a portfolio can be a collection of student artifacts like CAPT or CMT work. It can also include posters and other student generated work that you might post in your classroom. In AP Stats, there are a collection of experiments or investigations that involve a hypothesis, data collection, statistical calculations and graphs, discussion, and a conclusion. This collection of reports along with completed rubrics can be used as a portfolio.
This is more advanced stuff that is likely more long term activities for you.
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"Journals" I can't quiet call it, but I do ask my students to write various things through the year. The honors students provide me with much better response of actually doing the work than my general level does, but either way, I ahve have goten some good writing from them when I structure a question well.
ReplyDeleteI have had them summarize the unit just prior to the unti's test. I have also asked them to write what the know about a topic prior to studying it; the only one that works was: What are graphs, charts and tables used for in our culture/society? Where have you seen them?
Getting the students to write is a great was to get them to learn I think. If you can get them to do it every day tht would be great.