Team Leader Assignments

Today both classes of students decided on who would be a team leader from that class. I have 2 classes and told the students to select 2 leaders from each class. That will give me 4 total students to touch base with on the progress of the project. The plan is that I will not need to discuss the project with anyone other than the team leaders. The sole requirement for the team leader was a desire not to take the AP test. I did not want a student who would be focused on the AP test to be distracted by the worries of managing such a large project.

I started the conversation by telling the students that only non-AP testers were eligible for being a team leader for the project. Then I asked for volunteers. When a student would volunteer, I would have him/her leave the room, and students would "Fist to Five" (will explain below) the idea of that student serving as leader. All students would vote, including the AP testers, and if the majority of the students felt comfortable with that student as a leader, we would name him/her as one of the leaders.

One issue that arose in my second class period was an abnormal number of absences in one day. Apparently, tennis, baseball, and one-act-play were all out today. As a quick fix the process listed above was followed, but one student who was not present was selected as a team leader. Fortunately, I am confident about his ability to lead the group, and I had no objections to the class selecting him as leader even in his absence.

**Fist to Five** This is an opinion measurement tool used in the classroom to gauge the feelings of students on a matter. I will start by stating an opinion such as "Travis should be a team leader." Then students will display their thought by showing with their hand a number from zero to five.

• Zero means "I totally disagree with this statement. I will gladly argue against it if asked." 
• Three means "I do not care one way or the other." 
• And five means "I agree with the statement. I would even argue for it if required." 

Each student is required to vote, and all voices are heard with equal volume. This technique goes even further than merely voting for a leader. Here are some statements I have used with "Fist to Five" in my classroom.

• At the end of a complicated math lesson. "I think we need to work another problem together for me to really get this."
• "I have completed my test review and am ready to discuss issues I had working on it."
• "I would prefer to have extra time on the quiz today rather than use my notes on the quiz."

Selecting an Assignment

Today my classes gathered together at a common time to discuss the potential projects. I took the projects that students gathered and modified them to be large enough for a large group of students to complete over the course of a month. Students debated between asking colleges the value of National Honor Society and Academic competitions for college admissions or asking all UIL 2A schools about their contentment with the split district alignments. (Our school was recently put into 2 separate 3A districts. One for just football based on size and one for all other activities based on location.)

After asking questions, the students decided on the 2A project. They are now assigned to create a non-biased survey to gather the information. Then they will conduct a census of all 2A schools contacting both the superintendent and the athletic director of each 2A schools. (A census is required as there are only 220 2A schools). Students were hoping that by doing such a large project they will be able to work on a project that matters.

Tomorrow, two students from each class who are not taking the AP test will volunteer to be team leaders. Team leaders will be the contact for the class on work to complete. Team leaders have the luxury of assigning grunt work to peers but also have the responsibility of making sure the project stays on schedule. Once team leaders are assigned, I will primarily give tasks to team leaders and allow them to delegate tasks to their team members.

The meeting today took 5 mins, and the team leader assignments should take no more than 10 mins. Below you will find the spreadsheet I posted for the students to discuss the potential projects.

Student Contact	Organization	Pitched Project	Barrett's Version
Marcus	Mrs. Crumpacker	Value of Honor Society vs Academic Competition	Develop a non-biased survey. Sample 100 colleges and universities across the nation, 50 across Texas, and all top 25 universities based by size
Zack	Coach Fedora	Campus's opinion of new alignment	Develop a non-biased survey. Survey a census of all 2A schools to see how they liked the split alignment
Kyle	Community Pool	What proportion of the Navasota population use the pool?	Develop a non-biased survey. Obtain a map of Navasota and determine usage by geographical segments of the city

Gathering Ideas

As a small update, students were assigned community organizations to visit and ask about potential projects. Predictably, nothing came in on the first day, so we "bumped" the deadline back a day to today. Approximately 30 students were asked to collect projects. Three students came back with a potential project. The three projects are: collecting data about the feelings of the school about the recent UIL District re-alignment, polling community members to determine what proportion of the community uses the public pool, and polling universities and colleges to find the value of National Honor Society and Academic Competitions. Tomorrow both classes will meet in a larger meeting, and as a group, we will decide which project we will pursue.

Boss Fights

As I worked on the gamified course, I consistently came up with the thought that I would have to give up tests, for they did not fit the questing model. I was completely fine with this idea, but as a teacher hoping that others would want to pick up this model, I really wanted test to be a workable method for any subject.

At the same time, my students were failing as they were not able to knock out the quests quickly enough. I wanted to ensure that they were learning through projects, but the time needed to do these assignments was too extensive for my students. And then the solution to both of these problems came to me....

Boss fights!

I could create a test as a 1 day quest offering. Each student had one opportunity to tackle the test and the grade he received would contribute to his total experience points. I considered that surely no student would voluntarily take a test, but the key to motivation is incentive. I decided that the test was valuable to me, so it would need to be valuable for my students. I offered a maximum of 250 points for the boss fight. Students had learned that points come slowly, so the opportunity to get 250 points in one day was too much to pass up. And they all took the test and took it seriously.

Furthermore, if a student failed or missed the exam, he could always complete more quests to prove to me that he know the material. Essentially that is what we call corrections at our school, and students would always have the chance to prove knowledge of the material even if they were not a "good test taker."

Gamified Update

We have done the gamified class for 3 weeks now, (I know it is the same posting date as the intro blog, but I was a little behind and am now catching up) and the students seem to be doing pretty well picking assignments to do and sticking with them. I may need to increase to point value of the quests as I thought that students would be collecting more points than they have. Accordingly so, a number of students are failing on the progress report, but that will change as I look to make adjustments to the values.

One cause of this point deficiency is that I will give my students a great task yet not realize just how difficult the task is to tackle. They are about 90% on task, but my assessment of how difficult a task is was incredibly off. To adjust for this, I have posted a number of quick and easy quests that students should take and quickly raise their grade.

A positive note has been the quest, "Hijack the Lesson." I teach a new concept on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and students are provided my schedule of concepts to lecture about on the website. At any time, a student could say they want to teach the lesson, and hijack it from me. I will give that student a 5 min crash course on the topic and then let him research the concept and develop a lesson. Sometimes they make a powerpoint, sometimes they make code for others to look at, and sometimes they just come to the board and start talking. We have 50 min periods, so I tell them that I will give them 100 pts minus 2 pts for each minute I have to explain after the fact.

After 3 tries, we finally had a student make it through the whole lesson. The first couple of times, students would start and after a couple of minutes would get nervous and give up. As the students develop a culture of trying to teach and patience, they are starting to take more risks and learn concepts on their own. I have also attached a class wide achievement called "Better than Barrett" hopefully to provide incentive for students to keep trying to "hijack" the lesson.

Well, that's all for today. More updates to come!

Gamified Classroom

This semester I have tried "Gamifying" one of the classes I teach. I watched a video from the guys at Extra Credits on the gamification of the classroom, and I thought "why not?" I decided to apply this process to my Computer Science AP class, as it is my smallest class and the fewest number of students would be affected if this completely failed. Additionally, I created a FAQ that I both sent home and posted on my website. I have included it below.

Welcome to Mr. Barrett's Gamified Class!

What is a gamified class? 

In traditional education, students start the year with a 100 and a set of assignments they are forced to do. If they do the assignments well enough the grade will not drop too much, and hopefully the grade will stay above a 70 to receive credit at the end of the semester. A gamified classroom is modeled after a video game. In a gamified class, students start the grading period with a 0 and earn points from assignment they choose to complete. Students will be asked to earn 500 points per three weeks (that's 1500 points for the nine-weeks) if they want the full 100 for the course. 

How do students earn points?

Students will be presented with quests (aka assignments) as opportunities to earn the points. Students do not have to complete any one quest, but rather the quest board serves as a menu of tasks students may complete. Students may complete tasks that fit their learning style and strengths and still get assessed on information covered in class. Additionally, a class as a whole can earn achievements to boost their grade. With achievements (unless otherwise noted) the class works together to complete a higher goal. When an achievement is completed every student will receive points 

Won't this alter the progress report grade at the three-week grade check?

No. Each three-weeks, the expected maximum will increase by 500 points. This means that a progress check at 2 weeks might lead to a concerning grade, but the three-week check will be true to the traditional model. For example, a student with 200 points after the first week of class would have a 40 for the progress report. But this is actually a great grade for if he keeps up this pace, he will have a 600 at the three-week grade check?

Why do this?

Student engagement. Plain and simple. The hope is that students will feel a sense of progress as they watch their grade climb knowing that grade will not fall lower than it currently is. Students thrive when given choices on how to succeed, so students will be given a wide variety of options as to how to earn their grade. Furthermore, class achievements will create an environment of cooperative learning where students want to see others succeed in their endeavors.

Explain grouping methods. (PUGs, Guilds, etc.)

Guilds are groups created by the teacher. They change every nine-weeks, and sometimes a quest will be available to an entire guild. If they choose to tackle this task, students must work in the groups created for them by the teacher. A PUG stands for a Pick Up Group. A quest that is available to PUGs means that students may choose who they would like to work with. Often in PUG assignments, the group sizes are left to the discretion of the students. Therefore, points would be awarded to the student in light of how many people worked on the assignment. For example, a PUG quest worth 200 points would award a single student 200 points if he worked alone. However, if he worked with a partner, both partners would receive 100 points each. And if a group of 4 completes the assignment, each member would receive 50 points.

What about late work?

Quests have expiration dates and cannot be turned in after the expiration dates. (No exceptions). There are no late grades. But rest assured, there will be at least 1000 points available at the last day of the 9-weeks so a missed assignment can be made up. Only, a student may not like the assignment that is available at the end of the term.

Getting Ideas

I am going to attempt to document the end of the year project my AP Statistics complete. Overall, it is a semester process and could seem quite daunting at the outset. However, this project ends up being very easy for the teacher (not so much for the students, but hopefully that may be the point.)

We started off yesterday by brainstorming community service organizations that could use the service of an AP Statistics class. The most difficult concept to convey was how a Statistics class could do a service project that did not involve manual labor. We discussed how we have covered minimizing bias in a survey and how we had analyzed sets of data. We talked about how we had done hypothesis testing, and how we could help determine if data was statistically significant. Once we got that down, the ideas started to flow. Students came up with churches we could talk to, schools within our district, and local organizations like the Lion's Club.

Once we had a list of places and people we could talk to, each student volunteered to take a place or person to ask if there was statistics work we could do. If no student volunteered to take a place to ask, we erased it from the board as it was not deemed important enough for someone to spend time talking to. I gave the students a little over a week and told them to have contacted their person by Feb 24. The whole process took no more than 15 mins today.