To help guide today’s review, I will have students complete a 3-2-1 Assessment. Specifically, I will ask them to give me 3 things they learned this unit. 2 questions they still have about topics from this unit. And then 1 thing they would like for me to know. I ask that students keep the 3 new learnings and the 2 questions relevant to the unit we are working on. However, I allow students complete freedom on the 1 thing they want to tell me. (Teacher to teacher WARNING: Be prepared if you give them this freedom. You may learn things about your students that you may not want to know.) Although I sometimes feel tempted to have kids put their names on the notes, it is important that students remain anonymous for this activity so they can feel really comfortable asking questions they may otherwise think are ‘stupid.’
I like to then immediately review the questions that students asked. Often, there are many quick questions that I can address in seconds … “What’s my grade?” “When is the test?” “Can you stop giving us homework?” There are often some really good mathematical topic type questions too. These are the ones that I will now use to guide the review for today’s class period. I plan to do a whiteboard review to address some of these more in-depth questions. If there are only a few questions and maybe just some basic topics or many topics wanting to be covered from maybe an absent student and/or many students say they don’t have questions, I may decide to just scrap the whiteboard review and give students the test review in class. I don’t like to waste my students’ time either. So if they have been progressing through the unit, doing what they are supposed to, and feel ready to start the test review I will cut the whiteboard review game and have them start on their test review in class. I think this is a nice reward for a hardworking class. They now get time to complete the test review with their teams and won’t have homework tonight.
Environment: I think that 3-2-1 assessments are a great way to build students’ ownership in the classroom. It gives them an opportunity to communicate what they are feeling to us in an anonymous way. Even though some kids get silly with their 1 thing they want to tell the teacher (like something they had for lunch or who they are dating!) many kids tell me really interesting things (like that they got a scholarship, or they love to play this video game, or that they want to be a cryptologist when they grow up). Last year I learned many fun things about my students from these. Often, they fess up to what they write so I am able to link it to a specific student to learn more about them. I like to even read these to the class if there is time. They like to know what everyone told me and they sometimes get a good laugh out of it.
If you find that students need to review a little more they can play the whiteboard review game.This game requires every student to have their own whiteboard and their own marker. Although the game is played in teams, students are expected to do their own work. Before the class period begins, you will want to have a method ready to randomly call on students. I used to use Popsicle sticks which I wrote students name on, but now I just assign students a number (which they have in my class all year long) and use a random number generator to call on students. You can find a random number generator on www.random.org that is easy use.
To play the game, put a problem on the board. I plan to make these problems aligned to the questions that my students had. So I will just have my textbook ready and will pull problems as I go. If I know ahead of time that students are really struggling on a particular topic, I may have a couple of those questions ready to buy myself some time. You should be able to find one question to get the kids started on just while they are getting their supplies that are needed. I like to set a timer and say you have x minutes to solve this problem (MP1, MP2, MP6, MP7). I adjust the time based on how difficult the problem is. When time is up, I randomly select a student. This student will bring their whiteboard under the document camera and present what they have. Their team earns 2 points for just presenting. If they have correctly and completely answered the question they earn another point. If there is a mistake in their work the first student who raises their hand to point out the mistake will earn a point for their team (MP3, MP6).
If you have problems with students just trying to point out everything as a mistake even though it’s not, you may want to add the rule that teams who incorrectly point out a mistake loses a point. If you have more time in your class period or want to draw students in more you can make this game a little more fun by allowing student to ‘gamble’ the points they earn. When a student is awarded points for something they can gamble the points (double or nothing) by doing something fun. The gamble can be anything. Here are some favorites:
1) Throw a piece of paper into the trash can from 10 feet away.
2) Answer a trivia question.
3) Throw a piece of paper behind your back and catch it.
4) Correctly guess a coin flip.
You can even have students make up their own gambles before the game starts.
For this game, I put a greater emphasis on presenting the solution methods rather than finding the ‘correct’ way to do these. I really want to start working on getting students to try and not feel nervous about presenting incorrect work in front of the class. I find that students don’t like to present work especially when they are up there alone. You may want to have them bring a teammate up or if they absolutely refuse (I am not interested in ever making a kid do something they really don’t want to) they you could always present their work for them. I of course don’t encourage this and we all know it’s better for the student to be presenting their ideas, but sometimes this may be what is needed to get the class open to sharing.
Assign the test review for homework tonight if your students didn’t end up working on it in class today. Depending on how you plan to run the review tomorrow, you may want students to come to class tomorrow with the review completely done or maybe you will have them work on it in class tomorrow.