Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Warm-Ups with a Purpose

Warm-ups last year:

I would display four or five review problems on the Smartboard for students to work through as I took attendance. I would then walk around the classroom to see how students were progressing, but would often struggle to help very many of them, nor would I have a good sense of how the class did as a whole. We would then review every problem which was time consuming and not always helpful. The next day, I would create a few more warm-up exercises but I never had a clear picture of what my students were still struggling with or why.

Warm-ups this year:

I was asked to move into a new classroom where every student would have his or her own computer. Over the summer, I looked at several websites that would help me use formative assessment on a daily basis. I was happy to find Socrative (which is FREE!) and I use it everyday for my warm-ups. Students can quickly log in and start working on the exercises. I can create multiple choice, true/false, or short answer questions, and as students are answering them, I can see their responses live! It looks something like this...


This is kind of a big deal. As soon as a student gets something right or wrong, I know. And there's a lot I can do with that information. During those exercises, you'll routinely hear me say things like...

"Mary, awesome job on that last one. Everyone's having trouble with it."

"Almost everybody's getting #1 wrong. Make sure you read it carefully!"

"Sheri, that last one...how are you supposed to set up an addition problem with decimals?"

"Fawn, you seem to be having trouble with greatest common factor. Can I see your work for that last problem?"

"Hey, Andrew. Where's your notebook? Stop trying to do the work in your head. You're not Rain Man!"

After the students finish the exercises, I share the results with them and I let them tell me which ones we need to review (and which ones we don't). We look at commonly selected wrong answers and think about what mistakes students were making.


At the end of the day, I can throw this data onto a spreadsheet (shown below) and decide which topics/skills students have a firm grasp and which need further review. I can see how students progress in some skills over time and share that as a model of learning.


I love that students are getting instant feedback. I love that I have evidence of their growth. I love that we can review results as a class and, rather than students only focusing on their own mistakes, we can ask ourselves, what are we, as a class, doing wrong? What are we, as a class, doing right?