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>> I'm also part of an iFALCON FIG, another advertisement for it that people need.
I'm in the new ideas group and ...and I've been part of the new ideas FIG and I've been part
of FIGs for two or three years, I've lost count of how many.
I need to slow down, I think, but because they're
so exciting it's very hard to say no to a FIG.
So if you haven't been part of a FIG, please try it out.
I highly recommend it and in the math department I've also had the advantage
of teaching a math learning strategies course starting last spring and the great thing
about teaching that course was that at the same time the iFALCON pilot project started,
so I was able to coordinate the two.
I shouldn't say I started teaching the Math Learning Strategies last spring;
I have taught it before as well, but this is the first time that I have taught it as part
of a learning community with another math instructor and basically what we did,
both of us taught a math course, the algebra.
We taught each other's students math learning strategies.
Another thing, I would highly recommend forming a learning community
and maybe forming a learning community with a learning strategies course.
I know reading has them, I know there's many in many different areas and I have learned a lot,
even though I have taught the math learning strategies, as you can see I kind of think of it
as a starting over process, last semester when I started it with the learning community.
So I would highly recommend to have a learning community especially for developmental courses
with respect to the habits of mind and study skills in general.
This time I am going to be talking about the advance habit of mind and the activity
that you have in front of you is the second generation of the advance activity
that Manuel Lopez and I did last semester.
And basically what we did every week, it's a one hour a week course,
and what we did every week is we said okay, let's see what we're going to do
and how we're going to tie it in to that habits of mind and we got very excited with that being
up on the iFALCON's web site and if you go to it...yeah, we saw it up there,
we led our students to it and everything and then we said well, we want our students
to have something written down and even though we told them where it is
and where they can go find it, I wanted to give them a piece
of paper that they can then go home with.
And what I basically did is I formatted it so it would all fit on two pages,
you know trying to save some trees out there.
So this is the information the first two pages are the information that is up on the website
but reformatted so it fits on that one sheet.
The second page came out of our first lesson on advance and what we did is we went through,
through all the steps, all the steps, and we talked to our students about how the lesson
of the day fit within that realm and then we let them loose on it.
We gave the assignment of saying well now you try to do that and we didn't get much back
so the second time around when I used it this semester I went with the...I gave them
that second sheet in class and we went through and they, based on what we did in class,
they worked it as a homework assignment.
Again, this was a long term thing because we could do it from a learning strategies course.
And these are students who are in prealgebra
which also would be different than a higher level course.
So we went through it in class, they had to fill in about the lesson that I lead them
through of how the learning fit in each of the categories.
The next day they came back and they discussed it as a group and then we put it on the board
and we put all the categories and examples from various things that fit in there
and then I asked them to do it at home for one topic so the students
when they were brainstorming this at home and working in their groups I wanted them to come
up with different things so that kind.
That went through the whole half semester that we had gone through that so for the assignment
at home I asked them to do one particular assignment and as I've learned
through all our faculty groups you learn a lot more from our students work than we do
from the assignment so here is a sample.
This is two students that are in the middle, they're not the worst, they're not the best,
but you can see what they produced and it was better,
we got much more than we got the first time around but just this morning I was talking
to Manuel because this is very recent, just this morning I was talking to him.
I said we really want to concentrate on applying and analyzing with pre-algebra student.
The creating and evaluating a little bit with that, let's give them an introduction,
but I want them to be able recognize what apply means and what analyzing means.
So for next semester for this group of students, unlike for example
for my intermediate algebra students,
with whom I did this assignment last semester and it worked very well.
You know because we had done a lot more of that and they've had a lot more math classes to go
through and understand what all that means.
So for next semester we already said, you know, in our next meeting we'd have to talk
about giving them questions because one of the issues was is they couldn't come
up with the question, so if they can't come up with the questions,
how will they come up with the answers?
So that would be the next generation of this assignment, if you will.
And for now this is...I would say this is a good assignment for elementary
and intermediate algebra students and high level students.
For the math 20 and the math 40 students, we need to break it down further,
they need a lot more scaffolding although this has been already scaffolded
from the first generation so one of the things that I obviously learned I scaffolding...err
on the side of too much scaffolding, versus too little for the developmental students.
So one of the things that Manuel has done this semester is his assignment, because we realize
that there's an issue with the higher levels he wanted his student to go
into Real Math Instructor and um, learn about how we use...how we have questions
that go towards the analyzing, evaluating and creating.
So that's the assignment he gave and here is the student work for that.
So those are also two not the best, not the worst, but somewhere, I would say in the B range
for this assignment if you were looking at that.
And again it's process, as David said, it's a process every semester something changes
and because in the mathematics department we teach everything
from elementary level alge...elementary level arithmetic,
I mean elementary school level arithmetic through of course calculus,
the assignment has various levels as well.
One thing I wanted to add to this is
that in adapting these assignments we have the...we are fortunate
that we've also had a Title 5 grant over the past semester for our developmental courses
and what we have is a Math Gateways web site which houses a lot of the original activities
that the math faculty came up with through this and among them I happen to be the web master
for this and now [inaudible] has joined me and we have an intern this semester as well
so under our original activities we also have a studies skills tab
and there is Manuel's assignment for the...for this semester, learning the higher levels
and using [inaudible] to advance also is in there,
so both assignments are there as PDF files.
Of course we have these as Word files and if anybody would like them we will be happy
to share that and we hope that they'll be more of these activities.
And I love David's idea and I hope that those get to a web site where all of us can access it,
we have been talking about linking to the Mac versions of these activities from iFALCON
so I hope that we seem ore of that from other departments.
How you can get to this right now, from the Cerritos home page there's link to it
from the math department page, so under M you go to math department
and there is the Math Gateways grant resource site so you...when you click
on that right now it comes straight to here because I've already logged in
but because the faculty resources are...all of it is protected by password for now,
the student resources will doing a pilot in the spring but basically what comes up is the guide
on box for logging onto windows and you have to put your e-mail in there
and then your password and you can go to the web site.
So that's it, thank you very much.
[ Applause ]