October Reflections

Successes:

• Geometry - Angle Pair Relationships - I made an alternate version of this foldable. I pretty much followed Sarah's explanation. I had the students pick two colors and we colored all the "big" angles first while we talked about vertical angles, then we colored the "small" angles while we again talked about VA, then linear pairs. I then asked them to form names of the other relationships after I explained the concept of the transversal. They put names together before we looked at and filled out the chart on the other side of the foldable. I also told them by the end that all of the "big" angles were congruent to each other, "small" congruent to each other, and "big" + "small" = 180 (linear pair). The students held on to this foldable through out the unit! 
• Algebra 2 - Systems of Equations - Each of the 3 ways to solve a system was introduced differently. Students were comfortable with each of the different ways independently. They had a hard time differentiating how to solve a system when they weren't told which way to use. 
• Algebra 2 - Factoring - Taught the asterisk method for factoring a trinomial. The students really caught on and bought into this rather than expanding and factoring by grouping. 
• Parent Teacher Conferences were very beneficial for me as well as parents. We still have quite a few parents that don't understand our system of SBL. 

Concerns & Possible Solutions:

• Geometry - Logical Reasoning - Many students scored below where I had wanted them to on this summative. Many of these concepts are difficult and perhaps we need to spend more time on them, rather than moving quickly through this unit.
• Geometry - Angle Pair Relationships - Students scored higher on this summative than the LR unit, but still not high enough. 
• Algebra 2 - Students don't fully understand the concept of factoring. There is a large misunderstanding of what the process does. Since this was my first year teaching kids that had already seen factoring, I didn't focus on the foundation of factoring. When I introduce factoring next time, I will make sure students have an understanding of the basic terms. 

Questions:

• Should I be spending more time on 2.0 level material vs 3.0 level material? Is there a right way to do this? 
• Recurring because I still don't have an answer: How can I hold students accountable for homework? I need to still go over it to make sure the students that do the homework can check the answers they got.