What I Tried During Distance Learning: The Classwork (Part 2)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes
• Part 2: The Classwork (this post)
• Part 3: Communicating with Students
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have

Fewer, more versatile platforms

• Consider:
• Desmos is great for interactive lessons.
• Google Slides is great for group collaboration and presentations.
• Google Forms is great for regular, qualitative, in depth responses from students
• EdPuzzle is great for making interactive videos
• Khan Academy is great for developing procedural fluency with frequence immediate evaluative feedback
• Uploading pictures of handwritten work is great for math that can't easily or naturally be done on the computer
• AwwApp is great for online collaboration
• The Questions feature in Google Classroom is great for quick, public questions, where students and respond to each other
• CK12, DeltaMath, are probably great for different things
• But every new platform is a new investment of precious energy and time. So I wanted to remain as strategic as possible. I chose a few: Khan Academy, Desmos Activity Builders, and Google Classroom.

Khan Academy

• Why I chose it:
• It's very quick and easy to assign a bunch of pretty specific chunks of work.
• The videos, hints, and teacher dashboard are robust and about as good as it gets for what it is.
• Many kids are already pretty familiar with it.
• How I used it:
• Assign a big chunk of work that I am expecting kids to take a couple months to finish.
• I assign it all at once, so that different students can work at different paces.
• Through weekly check-ins, the majority of support I provide is in goal-setting and managing the big assignment in general.
• How I wish I'd used it:
• Only assign the problems, not the notes or videos. This reduces the "clutter" of the "things I need to do" part of the student-facing portal. The videos and notes are all right there if they need them. I also don't want a kid to feel like they have to watch a video if they don't need to.
• Assign things a week at a time. Lots of students had no idea how to manage such a big project. Some did, and it was cool, but most didn't. And the conversation, "Last week you said you'd do two hours of Khan, and you didn't do any? What do you think got in the way of that?" gets really old and discouraging, really quickly. This also allows me to easily change tack as the class unfolds over time.
• Have all the topics in Khan posted, linked, and shared, so that if a student wanted to jump ahead, they could.
• Provide some instructional videos for how to use Khan. I underestimated the difficulty of this. There were a bunch of onboarding, and ongoing, difficulties that could have been cleared up and prevented. It would have been effective to provide a walkthrough of the student-facing navigation.
• Have some differentiated pathways. Through a combination of teacher recommendation, and student self-selection, provide ~3 "pathways" of topics on Khan for students to pick. These pathways would be mostly differentiated based on readiness level. Ideally, adjacent pathways would overlap in about half their topics. It's also 
• The biggest way to differentiate Khan work is to simply assign different work--which can fine, if done appropriately. Some students need a review of earlier procedures before learning new procedures. Fortunately, this is the minority of what math is, as a whole, which is why tracking is largely unnecessary. But it is literally 100% of Khan. It's not particularly flexible for students with different levels of readiness.
• Questions I still have about Khan:
• How can I make it so that students can do more to pick the Khan they want to do? Like, we figure out what their goal is, and then they go through and pick the Khan Academy topics from the courses they want to do on their own? This would be a super amazing skills/disposition for their long-term education. Just an an example, my significant other basically used Khan to put herself through most of pre-med on her own. What a tremendous resource! I'd love to learn more about how to help students use it better.
• I'm not excited about how narrowly defined success is on Khan Academy, and the impact it has on differentiation. But for what it is (structured support for procedural fluency for accuracy), it's totally solid. Is it possible to use as like...20% of a kid's experience? Just a supplement? How little can I use it, while still having it be a meaningful thing to do on the side for students?
• What are the other things kids need to learn, in order for Khan to fulfill it's potential as a self-paced, adaptive, opportunity for students to take some real agency in their learning?

Desmos Activity Builders (ABs)

• In addition to the big, long-term assignment of working through the Khan Academy I assigned, I assigned weekly Desmos Activity Builders, as "Review/Previews," to borrow a term from CPM. These were meant to review the major work of the course. They started out more as mixed-spaced practice, with a handful of different math topics, and then over time I opted more into the pre-built Desmos ABs, which are less mixed, and more focused on individual topics.
• Active learning that's not assessment
• Khan Academy basically has two modalities:
• "Take Notes": students as mostly-passive receptor during videos or notes passages.
• "Performance": students being quizzed on content they ostensibly should be able to do, after the videos/notes. Note, even if they aren't called "quizzes," and they're just "practice problems," they're basically the same thing.
• But there is another major modality that should make up the vast majority of a student's work: exploration, attempts, guessing/checking, looking for mistakes, tracking what other people are trying, and literally every other math-doing verb. Desmos does a better job of this. It's actually one of their design principles. [ensure students are doing a variety of verbs.] This made it feel like the natural supplement to Khan Academy.
• Automatic feedback
• Dan Meyer and the Desmos team have shared a lot of reasoning, and concrete examples about the difference between evaluative and interpretive feedback. One of many incredibly influential concepts I've learned from them. Go check it out, if you're not already familiar. I've tried to incorporate a variety of automatic feedback mechanisms into the activities, because prompt (not always immediate) feedback is helpful for student learning.
• Below is an example of how I tried to design for interpretive feedback in the ABs I made. It doesn't immediately tell them what is right/wrong, but it signals that something is wrong. It also provides a model for thinking about the problem in a different way (graphically, as opposed to algebraically).

via GIPHY

• On the final slide of the AB, I also included a slide outlining which problems they got "probably right" or if they needed to "keep trying." Here's an example of what that might look like:

• Students seemed to value this slide. In opted to put it on the final slide to make it intentionally a bit of a hassle, hopefully motivating students to rely on the interpretive feedback provided directly on the slide. But I also know how some students appreciate some direct feedback, especially if they're too lost to be able to make enough use of the interpretive feedback.
• Share Classmate's Response
• Goal 1: Increase opportunities for students to meaningfully communicate with other students.
• Every time a student clicks "Share with Class," they are given a few other student responses. Importantly, not all student responses are definitely correct, or easy to understand. But students have a natural desire to see what other students said, to see if it validates their own response. Students are motivated to try to make sense of what other people are saying. This, in and of itself is an educational experience.
• Goal 2: Increase visibility of other students doing the same work.
• In the context of asynchronous learning, students don't have nearly as much interaction with each other, as a result of their common work in the class. But seeing other students' names, and seeing that they're doing the same work, can hopefully make students feel more like they are in community with other students.
• It was difficult to manage wanting students to look at other students' work, while also not wanting them to see all the work done for them, spoiling the problem. Over time, I got better at figuring out how to ask helpful "follow up" questions, the responses of which provide some general feedback, without spoiling most of the work on the slide.
• Focus of the work
• Lessons: These are ABs focused on a single topic, to some depth. For these, I typically used a relevant pre-made Desmos AB that I liked. Or tweaked one so that it fit my class better. Here's an example of the Desmos classic Match My Line, edited with love by me.
• Review/Preview: Here is an example of a Review/Preview AB I made from scratch. For reasons outlined above, most RPs followed this same structure:
• Private check in (shared only w/ me)
• Public check in (shared w/ class)
• Hints: a link to a helpful video, article, or example related to each problem
• Notice/Wonder
• ~6 problems, one problem per slide
• Correctness checker: indicating whether all the check-able work was correct.
• Questions I still have about Desmos:
• Most Desmos ABs that are single lessons are mostly designed to be executed in a class, with other kids, and other teachers. They are meant to facilitate classroom learning. How does the design of a "lesson" AB have to be different, in the absence of a teach? Of other students?

Problem Sets

• Problem Sets (PSets) were the primary mode of classwork for my elective, whereas my Math 1 class was Khan + Desmos. I wrote a bunch about what they are here. In particular, I wrote about how I used them during distance learning here. The two things I really liked about them were their natural capacity for offering choice as well as a reasonable system for feedback and revision.

The next post in this series is Part 3: Communicating with Students.