Mathematics Assessments and Programming | Year 1, 2 and 3 RESOURCES HERE

Hi everyone, this is Winnie. Over the last 3 years at my school, I've been leading and collaborating with staff on visible learning and formative assessment strategies as a teacher, instructional leader, and then a relieving AP, and I'm really sad about leaving my school, but I have just gotten a new role as an assistant principal curriculum instruction, so yeah, I'm really excited for the new role, and I'm really proud to have worked with with such a hardworking and collaborative staff, and I wanted to share with you some of our work today. So I know that, you know, when we have high expectations, it means that our students perform really well. It means that we know our students really well. It means we can support their learning and that they're continually challenged so that the work that we're setting isn't too easy or not too hard, and, you know, all our students need to be challenged and engaged for them to develop their potential fully, which means that we need to differentiate and know what to teach by doing little pre-assessments to know what they already know so that we can differentiate our instruction. And today I wanted to just show you some of the work that our hardworking teachers have created. So I wanted to share the math programs with you today. And they include some pre-assessment, some explicit teaching, differentiated instruction, and exit slips which will inform reporting. So I'm going to be inviting a guest with me today who will share, yeah, share their work and I'll ask some questions and they can share with you what they've been working on and how, yeah, how they've been running the math programming, yeah, with their students. All right, awesome. I'm so excited because I have the lovely Jess Minett here with us today, and she's one of our lovely contributors to the programming that we're sharing today. We're going to welcome Jess. Hi, Jess. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Winnie.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yes, so I work at the same school as Winnie and I teach Stage 1. I've taught Stage 1 now for 3 years and we teach composite classes, so we teach Year 1 and Year 2 and we do a lot of team teaching with— we have big open doors, so a lot of our maths with the class next door, which provides a lot of differentiation. And yeah, and next year I'm moving down to kindy, so I'm not sure how we'll do maths, but we'll have to figure it out. But at least I've got all this experience from Stage 1 with the maths program. So yeah.

Yeah, and just as I'm leaving now, Jess is going to be our new relieving assistant principal. Yay! I am so excited for you, Jess. You're going to do great. Yeah, you will, you will. You'll be all right. Yeah, so we are sharing our math program today and it has— it is a lot of hard work from a lot of teachers who have been on Year 1 and Year 2, so I'm really proud to share this because there's a lot of great differentiation, high expectations. Data assessment, et cetera, that you can take on. So thank you for being with us, Jess, and for sharing your knowledge. All right, I'm gonna share my screen and just show you what we will be sharing with you. So, so some of the programming, so I will, even though I'm showing you term 1, we will be sharing term 2 and 3 and 4 as well. So I'll just show you what it looks like. So there will be folders, and in each folder there will be different topics that you can have a look at. And in each folder, for example, for whole number, there will be a pre-assessment, the program, some exit slips, and also a document of some images that you can put up on your wall. So we're going to have a look at the pre-assessment because it's really important to see where our students are up to so that we know what to teach and where to, yeah, where to meet our students' needs. So, Jess, do you want to talk us through this or what the pre-assessment usually includes?

Yeah, so basically what we do is at the start of every week we do a pre-assessment and it's only 5 questions. Generally the first 2 questions are, for example, in the syllabus, it'll come under whole number 1, and then the second 2 questions will come under whole number 2, and then the last question is usually a Stage 2 content question. So basically every kid has one of, one of these, and it's a QR code, and we just put their name on the back. But if, if I pull it carefully, each side is a letter, so A, B, oh gosh, C and D. And basically what happens is we put the clicker up on the big screen, we read out the question, we read it a couple of times, read through A, B, C and D, and then they have to hold their clicker the right way up. So if they think it's D, they've got to hold it with D facing up. They think the answer is C, they hold it with C facing up, and each child's QR code is different. So they're all different. And what you need to do is called Plickers.com. You go on and I'll show you mine, and you set up your own class, and then they, they give you these and you download them and you print them out. And that we laminated them, but they don't work with normal laminating sheets. You need the matte laminating sheets. We've had these for 2 years. They're a bit ratty now, so next year they'd probably— I'll probably make new ones. And you just assign them to a number. Like this one is, I don't know if you can see, this one's number 5. So you just assign every kid in your class to a number and they have that same one every week. And then when you do it and they hold it up in the air, you either get your iPad or your phone and you use the Plickers app and you scan around the room and on your iPad or phone you'll see all their names and they'll just go green, green, green, green, green, and then it'll tell you You know, Child A, B, and C haven't answered. They've got to hold it up nice and still. They can't have fingers on the black bits. And yeah, it automatically captures it on the app. I might share my screen.

And how long does it usually take, Jess?

Oh, not long. 10 minutes. Very fast. But you easily go on, this is the website, clickers.com. And you make your class and you enter all your students' names into it and then it will give you the PDF of the QR codes and then you basically print the QR codes out and laminate them. They say with the normal gloss laminating sheets that when you scan them with the camera, sometimes it, it doesn't pick it up. So that's why we did the matte laminating sheets. And then from this website, You need to put in all of your pre-tests, which we've done. It doesn't take long. All you go, you just go New Set. Basically, you can type the questions in like this or you can do this little next to where it says Add to Q looks like a download button, Import Questions, and you can do bulk. And you basically, what we do is we just copy it from the Google Doc here And then, for example, if for Question 1, B is the correct answer, you just click B. Wherever the green is highlighted is the correct answer. You basically just import it. I'll just go back over here to one of these ones. I'll show you what it looks like. Then it basically looks like this and the green is the correct answer, but they won't see the green. This is just for you to check before you import it. Basically, and then you save it. You, when you want to play it, you have to click Add to Queue, click your class, and then if I go back, it'll say it's over here saying Play Now. If I click Play Now, my class, this is what would show up on the screen. Okay. What number comes before and after 30? So we usually read through all the questions. And they hold up their card and we scan it. It doesn't take long at all once you've got it all set up. It doesn't take long at all. Like, they get their card, they know what to do, they hold it up with the A, B, C, or D, and it scans it, and then all the data goes onto your app or even onto that website. Yeah, we do pre-assessment start of every week because we do a new topic every week, and that's how we know what groups we will put them into.

Oh yeah, do you want to show the data that you get from Plicker? The screenshots.

I'll show you, I've taken screenshots, for example, this is Term 2 Week 7 edition and it tells you what percent all the kids got and I've got it as from high to low, so all of these kids got 100, the greens also have 80s and then anything below 80 goes into red, so 60s, 40s, 20s, 0 and that child was last one says absent. So from looking at that, we can see where maybe our kids could go. We have 3 groups, so we have the red group, which is usually like whole number 1, then we'd have the orange group, which is whole number 2, and then the purple group, which is doing Stage 2 content. But for example, if we have a Year 1 student who got 100%, we probably wouldn't put them in the purple group, but we will put them in the orange group doing whole number 2. If there's kids who are, you know, 20%, 0%, they would be in the red group. If there are Year 2 students who are getting 100%, we would generally, and we, we know that they're capable, we would put them in the purple group. But obviously with things like this, there are sometimes, you know, the kids are looking around, some kids will just copy, so if you know, if you get a child getting 100% and you know that they're not very confident with maths, then we wouldn't just put them in the orange group, you need to use teacher judgment as well, it's not just, oh, they got 100%, they must be, they must know what they're talking about. Also, it gives you a breakdown, so just below where it says questions, you can click on each individual question and it will tell you who got it wrong, So I clicked on one of the questions and it was, what is the difference between 9 and 5? So 4 people got it right and all the names are there, and then the other kids who did it wrong, their names are there as well. So you can see, you can, you can go in and be like, they can do this, they can do this, but they can't do this. So then maybe we'll think, we'll look at the program and look at what's the orange group doing this week. If they're not doing anything of what they got wrong, then they'd probably go in the red group. Every week we do the clicker and then we get the, this, this data. We have their names all on a laminated piece of white, white little strip. We've got a Blu Tack on the back and we put it, them into groups. So we have 4 groups for each. So this photo shows the red group, this photo shows orange and purple. Okay, so we basically leave them up on the wall and then we just grab all the names and we can easily just physically maneuver them. And it also helps us because then we can think about like behavior problems, what kids go on what group. And that is their group for the week. We have an I statement for that group activity. Okay, so for the orange group, the number 1 rotation, they'll be building and writing a number pattern. In the second rotation, they'll be describing a number pattern. The third rotation, they'll be doing missing numbers. And the fourth rotation, they'll be creating their own patterns, and sometimes they'll also do an athletics activity. So that's how we— and then, so then every week, then say that's whole number, then next week we might do, for example, area. So we do a different pre-assessment, and, you know, you might have kids who are really good at whole number and then some kids who just have no idea about area. So even though, you know, last week they were in the orange group, this week they might be in the red group for area, and so we easily can just move the names around so they're in different groups every week kind of thing.

Yeah, I find that it's, it's really important as well to see where our students are at for each topic because it will change. Like, do you find that it changes for your cohort as well?

Yeah, like in here, this is addition, right? And I don't have the names up, but overall 74%, and then subtraction was a lot worse. So they're really, they're much better at addition than they are at subtraction. So even though, you know, they were in the purple or the orange group for addition, for subtraction they might not be in that same group. They might be working, you know, only at the whole number 1, at the addition 1 kind of thing. Or subtraction 1 in the Stage 1 syllabus and then I've got here, yeah, whole number. So there's, they're always moving, they're never always getting the same, the same correct.

Yep, so all these pre-assessments we'll be sharing with you so you'll be able to input that data. The programs we're sharing with you as well, so they have all the syllabus outcomes comes and also the, the goals, the I can statements as well. Do you want to walk us through the program?

Yeah, so what we normally do is in the middle of the week we do an explicit lesson and that is them in their group. So we will have grouped them already and we say, okay, you know, if you're in the red group, you're going to stay with me. If you're in the yellow and the purple, you're going to go next door, so they go together and we have an explicit lesson for that topic for the week, so you can see it's differentiated. And then on the end, at the end of the week, we do our rotations, which are here, so we have 4 rotations and they each have a different I can statement, which tells the kids what that activity is asking them to do. We're a big visible learning school, so it's really good having it up on the wall. And, you know, when they're confused, we say, we'll read the statement, what are you, what are you meant to be doing? We try to make it quite hands-on because it's Stage 1 and they need a lot of manipulating of things to understand quite complex things. And we also use mathematics as we have that at our school, and we're always using whiteboards, counters, dice. And trying to repeat, repeat concepts with different activities so that they can have time to practice their skill. And we set them up in our room, so for example, mine is always the red room and next door is always the orange room and then we have a breakout room which is our purple room and we have big signs that say red 1, red 2, red 3, red 4 and they go on all the desks and they're the rotations. And we have trays. So basically, let's put the trays out with all the equipment and start of the rotations. You know, I'll be sitting in my room with the red kids and I'll explain every rotation, and then we call out their names and they go and sit at their rotation. And usually they spend about 15 to 20 minutes at one rotation, it just depends. Um, and sometimes they're taking photos and putting them on Seesaw as well. Or sometimes they do do a worksheet. And yeah, it's pretty straightforward. It's— the kids are really— they really like the maths groups. They like the hands-on. They really enjoy it, actually. And that's, yeah, basically how we differentiate. And then, you know, if I am working in the red group and I've got a child who's— who I've noticed is just flying by, then I can easily just say, oh, go and pop into the orange room. Go and, you know, go and see the teacher next door, and she'll put that child in a different group or vice versa. If someone's, you know, up in the purple and it's just too difficult, we'll just move them down to the orange. And the kids, they don't, they don't mind. They understand each week we're good at some parts of maths and other parts we need more help. So yeah, basically the program. And we have used games and things, that's why they're like—

And what would you do like because, you know, we're in COVID times at the moment, so it's really hard to team, or, you know, it's great doing team teaching, but then if you are in a situation where you can't team teach, how would you use this program? To different—

Yeah, I guess I would still do the colored groups, but I would probably, because we rotate, we get up and I would probably have them all— if it's just your one class that's only like, you know, under 30 kids, I'd probably have the red group all sitting together because it wouldn't be as many, right? Because it'd probably be, you know, it's usually half in the red, half in the yellow, and then we usually only have max 3 kids from each class in the purple. So it's like half your class doing red, half yellow, a couple couple doing purple. So I'd probably have them sitting in their groups and I would have all the rotations there, and I would probably just put a timer on and say, okay, now we're going to do the first activity. And then I'd probably ring the bell and I'd say, pack it up, probably put it on the floor and get the second one, rather than them moving around the room. Do you know what I mean? Because that's way too busy. You're in one, three different groups. But I would still differentiate it and I would still do the Plicker because it's really easy and that makes you feel like catering to all the needs rather than them all just doing red when they can really be extended and do harder problems.

Yeah, because I find that, you know, when we're not meeting students where they're at or when they're not feeling challenged, then that's when they get a little bit distracted.

Oh, yeah, yeah, they don't want to, they're bored, so they do other things, right? Yeah, exactly, that's right.

All right, we're going to have a look at the exit slips now, so we'll be sharing the exit slips for each of the groups. So do you want to walk us through what, like, how you use it for, especially for reporting purposes?

Yep, so what you're looking at now, for example, is the purple group This is exit slip 1 and it's got 4 copies because we usually just print it, yeah, cut it into 4s and then second page will have purple 2, yeah, so purple 3 and purple 4 just for when we're printing and cutting. So basically, they usually have 3 or 4 exit slips because sometimes if they're doing mathematics for the fourth rotation, we won't do a fourth exit slip and the exit slip matches the I can statement for for that rotation and it should be focused on whatever activity they did. So for example, Purple 1, they were obviously doing an activity of finishing the pattern, yeah, missing sequential numbers, so they were filling in missing numbers, so then for the exit slip they're continuing a pattern of 4 digits, that's what they're doing, and basically it's purple so they know they're in the purple group. And they basically, we give, we used to at the start when we started this, we used to just wait to the end of maths groups and then we would give them the 4 exit slips. But then we were realizing that they were kind of just getting way too confused. There was 4 things in front of them with 4 different kind of strategies or ways for whole number and they were just, they were just not getting it. Then we decided that end of each rotation, we'll stop, we'll have 5 minutes silence, and they do that exit slip. So as soon as they do the activity, then they do the exit slip for that activity, and that worked a lot better. And we used to glue them in books, and then that was becoming a bit of a nightmare, so then we started printing them off on one sheet of paper, like exit slip 1, 2, 3, and 4 together. Which was a little bit better, but then they tend to look at the next one before they've done that rotation. So it's just a bit of what works for you, or just cutting them up and handing them out. The emojis are meant to be for how did you feel at that rotation. The younger kids seem to just circle whatever they, whatever they're feeling at the time, but when you ask them about it, they're like, oh, I don't know why I circled that. Okay. So we did get rid of them this year. We got rid of them because it was just not, well, it wasn't beneficial for our data.

Yeah, I think at first, the, yeah, at first you were wanting to have the students in a space where they were reflecting on, you know, how do I feel about this activity, but I think in the end it's more about, you know, can you show us what you know. Or what you've learned.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool. And then I might— so we've got the wall as well, and then I just wanted to show this.

Yep. Okay, so what we do then is we grab all the exit slips, you know, at the end of the lesson, end of the day, whenever you have time. And we really quickly mark them because they're only like short questions. It's pretty simple to mark. We just quickly give it a tick and we have this kind of— oh, and this is all my Year 2. So I've got their names and their year and there's a separate one for Year 1. And then we've got red, yellow, and purple. And each week we'll type in, for example, whole number, and we'll type in all the "I cans" that we have there. And then we'll have rows. If they're absent, you fill in absent, then if, so for example, this first person in Year 2 was in the red group, so we colour it red if they got the exit slip correct, we leave it blank if they didn't get it correct, mathematics is grey because there was no exit slip, so most of the Year 2s were in the yellow group, which is where they should be. You can see this whole bank of kids here got all of their exit slips correct, But then down the bottom here, we had a couple who really didn't understand how to get objects into an array, and that teaches us that next week— what we said, for example, we do rotations on a Friday, and then usually on the following Monday or Tuesday, we look at this data and we go, okay, where are the gaps? And then we do an explicit lesson on what they've missed. To ensure that they, they get that, you know, solidified and fixed up. And then we do go back again halfway through the year, we repeat. Yes, we do this after every maths groups, you fill in our data and then, you know, at reporting time and things like that, or when you have interviews, you can just like pull this out and you can look at it and okay, they can do this, they can't do this, and all the I can statements relate to the syllabus.

And I love how it's very, yeah, it's very clear. Like, you can see whether they are on, you know, on target, or whether they're below, or whether they're high as well. So if you had any E2s that were in the purple, then you would be able to see that, and then you could literally just grab the I can statements and you literally just pick things off, yeah, at the report time and just go through them.

When we're doing maths comments. And also, we recently started, for example, when we're highlighting, if they didn't get something correct, we have been putting little notes that just like, "Got half correct," or, you know, "Flipped the fraction the wrong way," or just little notes that tell us what they struggled with, but nothing too detailed, just like a couple of words. Just so when we go back to look at it or reteach, we can go, okay, that was where they went wrong. Sometimes they will get, you know, half of the exit right but not the other half kind of thing, or we'll write like silly mistake or cap, you know, did the right strategy, like for example, jump strategy, did it correctly but counted their numbers wrong at the end kind of thing. So adding that little bit of comment is a big help as well.

Thanks for that, Jess. So, yeah, we're going to be sharing these resources for you which will be ready to go, the pre-assessments, the exit slips, the wall, the programming. It is a mammoth job that you've all put together and collaborated on, so thank you so much for, yeah, for sharing it with everyone. For sharing your wealth of knowledge and how you've been doing it in the classroom, because I'm sure every— yeah, everyone would be able to benefit from, you know, the resources that you've created and what you've shared with us today. So, yeah, thank you so much, Jess, for joining us.

Yeah, it's definitely been a team effort, and just, we've, you know, we've fiddled with it, we always make changes, you know, and If we do a group and, you know, that activity just doesn't work, then we change it in the program or put it in the evaluation. But always, yeah, changing it and just feeling around. And even the wall as well, we just don't know, figuring out what we, what kind of pictures we put. We used to have lots and lots of pictures and they just never looked at it. And then we found sometimes, for example, you know, if you're doing 3D objects, like I said, we have the those big labels that say like red 1, red 2, red 3, red 4, we put like a poster on them because that's at the individual groups and then they tend to look at that more rather than it being on the wall in the other end of the classroom. But yeah, we're still trying, yeah, it's still, it's always a work in progress. But yeah, we really like it, the kids love it and the data's really good.

Yeah, how do you think it's changed or has improved with embedding visible learning and all these formative assessment strategies?

Yeah, I think it's really beneficial because the kids know exactly what they're doing, you know, instead of like, "Oh, what you doing in maths today?" "I don't know." They can go, "Oh, you know, I was learning about using arrays. I can use arrays." And we always use "I can, I can, I can" and get them in that language, and even when they post things on Seesaw, it's "I can." I can, I can, I can do this. And definitely the, the Plicka and the exit slips, it's that simple, it's a really simple and small snapshot at that point in time which tells you how they went and then it really helps us to reteach or fill in the gaps rather than just doing a test at the end of the term and like then you realize, oh my goodness, they've missed all of this information, how am I going to reteach at the end of the term.

Yeah, and it's about, you know, going and just like assessing and looking at the data along the way so that you can adjust along the way and you're not waiting until the very end to figure out, oh no, this is what we missed, or we've got to go back and reteach this, or, you know, oh no, it's reports time.

Yep.

You know, that reminds me of this picture that I had actually. Of this one here with all the, I think you were saying like with the names and then it has like what they're working on underneath.

Yep. Yeah, they do really, they really do like the, like those pictures that show the strategy. That is, then they can, you can go, if they don't know how to do it, we go, go look at the wall, look at the strategy, and then it gives them kind of a prompt, visual prompt, that, oh yeah, I know what to do.

And I love it because it's, you know, it's like the wall is another teacher. They just go there. Yeah. All right, well, thank you so much, Jess. Was there anything else that you wanted to share? I feel like you've shared like so much today.

I don't know, I can't, I think I've said everything, I don't know.

Yeah, any tips for anyone who's trying this out for the very first time?

I would just say just give it a go, don't think it's going to work the first time you do it, it took our kids a while with the flickers, you need to practice a couple of times, they will just hold up a random letter and the groups, yeah, they once they get into the rhythm of it and they understand it It works really well. And once you get like the games and every— once you get like quite a lot of things, all the resources, it becomes a lot easier. At the start, it was a lot of work because we were printing, we were laminating every week. But once you build up all the resources and we keep them all in tubs and according to the colors, like, because we did that last year, this year we literally just go out to the tub We go to orange where it says number and algebra and we pull out, we pull out the activities and it's super easy. But it does, yeah, the first bit is a hard slog but it's worth it.

All right, well thank you so much, Jess, for, yeah, taking time out of your afternoon, your busy afternoon to share all your knowledge and all your resources and the data and I thank every, yeah, every teacher who has worked with us on, on these programs because it's been a mammoth job. But I'm sure that everyone will appreciate all the hard work that you've put in, so thank you so much for that.

No worries. Yeah, it's been— everyone's done a little bit. Yeah.

All right, well, we're gonna leave it there, but Jess, do you want to share your socials and, yeah, and share where people can find you?

Yes, well, I will send it to— can I send it to you?

Yeah, of course, definitely. Yeah, of course. But yes, if you, um, yeah, if you like this video, make sure that you click the like button and subscribe, and we'll, yeah, we'll share some more tips soon. So thank you everyone and see you later.

Bye! Thank you, thanks for having me.

No worries.