My Discovery-Based Math Elective: Circulation Notes Tracker (Part 6)

This is part 6, of a 15-part series of posts detailing how I developed and piloted a discovery-based high school math elective. The first, introductory, blog post for this series can be found here [Introductions]. The goal of this post is to describe how I used observation notes, taken during circulation, in order to provide further assessment data for grading and feedback.

• Assessing students is always a complicated business. It is important that students have multiple options for expression and communication. The primary method of assessment here is the work that's written in the notebook. But we can enrich our assessment of student understanding by taking notes on the things they do and say that don't make it into the notebook. This was especially important considering that there aren't any other different forms of assessment in the class, outside of the PSets and Exhibitions. By employing multiple methods for tracking/assessing students, we can layer the different data sets, and hopefully converge on a pretty clear assessment of the student's work and understanding.
• This additional layer of daily assessment was a done by "taking notes" on students, based on my observations of them, and conversations with them during my circulation. I say "taking notes" with quotation marks, because it wasn't nearly as thorough or qualitative as the term suggests. I basically had a tracker that listed every kid, and had one space, per kid, per "category," per day of the week. The categories were the four I identified in the PSet rubric: the intersections of Numericals vs. Logic & Reasoning, and Exploration vs. Depth of Understanding. You can get a full blank copy of the template here.

• As I would circulate, I would try to put a check mark when a student did a super solid job of that category that day. Then, when I sat down to grade PSets, even if I didn't have notes on exactly what a kid did that was evidence of that particular set of standards, I had some idea of how they did the previous week.
• I recognize that taking circulation notes is one of those super classic best practices that teachers are always recommended to do. And I think most teachers would agree that it's pretty unambiguously a good supplemental source of assessment data. It's also difficult to do. Class happens so fast, and there's so much to do, that it's difficult to find time to pause between students and take notes on their understanding. And it's even harder to make sure that the way you do it is systematic, equitable, and consistent, ideals we must constantly work towards in our grading and assessment of students.
• I had this elective first block of the day, and most days I wouldn't actually fill out the tracker until my prep period, after I had already taught a completely different class, which was not ideal, but mostly adequate. But I never tried to fill out the tracker for previous days--I knew my memory wasn't reliable enough to remember things that students said a day earlier. I'd rather have a blank day for everyone.
• How you make this system work for you depends on your individual practice and routine as a teacher. I know some teachers who use circulations trackers like this every day, and it's a system they use reliably and well. But in a class where there are so few different kinds of work being formally assessed for grades, and where student performance is so incredibly dependent upon the individual student, there HAS to be some system besides just assessing what is written in students' notebooks. And a circulation tracker does a decent job of that.