16% Time Revised: Scaling it back

Hi there. Been a while hasn't it? Well I'm back baby!

I'm now on my second term of the 16% time experiment, and I've made a few minor changes. There were two big problems with my first attempt; we didn't have time (only 3 or 4 hours per term) to really get in to some of the more impressive sounding projects I (or they) suggested and many pupils had no idea how to start answering some of the questions posed. This is a top-set group and yet I repeatedly had to suggest googling a maths word they didn't yet know!

I still think that these big projects are within their grasp, but I think we started too big and students who have not done anything like this before just got lost.

Scaling it back

• Project suggestions are now reasonably 'completable' in 1-2 hours.
• They come with minor prompts and questions, to scaffold the directions they could take.
• There is a difficulty rating on each project.
• If they want to do a different project, I have a form for them to work through that gets them to write their own criteria for success and scaffold the project themselves.

We've had one lesson in this style and it was a lot more purposeful an environment and more accessible to the lower end of the class. I'm not sure if this will be quite as inspiring as before though. I'll let you know how it goes.

Here are my new suggested projects so far:
Revision  Complex Numbers  Arithmetic Proofs  Euclid  Different bases  Estimation and Large Numbers  Magic

16.6666666666% Time

I have some very bright and very highly motivated pupils in my top-set year 10 class this year and I feel like my classes are a bit wasted on them. The topics we go through need to be practiced and there is always extension material for them, but they just breeze through it. Last week I completely failed at tried to create a 3D-Graph, following this excellent post by Ashli. Basically I botched the explanation and expected too much to get done in a single lesson. Anyway, it was motivating to some, but others just felt it was another standard maths lesson.

Inspired by Shawn Cornally's Inquiry style of teaching and the idea I first heard from Google of 20% Time for employees, I decided to try out our own version of 20% Time in class:

In a recent survey I did with the pupils, most were happy with the pace of our classes, about 6 felt it was too slow and a couple felt it was too fast. I didn't want to leave that majority out of this, which is why I give them the option to revise topics. I will provide materials for this and it should hopefully help those less confident students.
To start with, my guess is that pupils will not have any idea where to go with this, so I have a few suggested project ideas:

Though I'm dangling these in front of them in the hope that someone will bite, I made it clear that they can really choose any topic they want. There are only two constraints:

• It must be mathematical and include maths which is currently beyond their knowledge/ability.
• Success or failure in the project is not so important, but you must aim for the project to be awesome (no powerpoints based heavily on wikipedia, etc. I want outrageous 6ft models and flashing, dancing lights!)

When they have picked a project and started working on it, I will drop a few words like 'game theory' as hints to the directions they could go, and vet their projects for mathematical content and awesomeness. Apart from that though, I hope to sit back and let them explore.

What do you reckon? Do you have any other intriguing/inspiring project ideas I could offer up as bait?

New year's resolutions

Hot on the heels of the start of summer break, I have plenty of goals for my professional development next year and I wanted to get them written down before I forget them:

• Bring SBG in to all of my classes; the pilot period is over and I love it. :)
• Try to avoid getting stuck in the daily grind (this goal deserved its own post: see earlier post)
• Introduce Community Problem Solving as an after-school group - I'm really excited about doing this. The idea is that students identify some problem in their community (community could be school, local community, region, county, nation or world) and create a project that aims to solve that problem. In doing so they must plan the logistics, get sponsors/funding, recruit help and delegate work. Past projects I've heard about are extremely wide-ranging and awesome sounding. Take a look at an example here.
• Start teaching wrestling/grappling in the school's free-choice period - One of my main hobbies outsite of work is Mixed Martial Arts, which I've been doing for about a year and a half now and I really want to get it in to my school life somehow. Because of the inherent dangers of MMA, it would be hard for me to ever teach it in school. Wrestling and other forms of grappling (like Judo and Jiu-Jitsu) are much more regularly taught to children and so I feel safer doing this. I don't nearly have enough experience to properly coach this, but the school I'm at has a free-choice period once a fortnight (which works like a taster session), which seems perfect for my level of knowledge. I'm really excited about this, but also worried about potential health and safety issues. I'd love some advice about this. The dangers are obvious:

• Have at least one functional and rich problem for each unit I teach to either introduce the unit or round it off - I want classes to feel like they lead to something and are not just endless drills of abstract skills.