"Winding Down"

Pella Externship

Days 25-28

 

I'm wrapping up some loose ends this week as the Externship winds down.  I have a meeting this afternoon a member of the data analysis team.  We are going over the regression equations that were generated to help give a little perspective to how useful they really are.  It's been few years since my last Statistics course and it's not exactly like riding a bike.  I've been putting together a list of questions for the meeting today.  The simulations have been returning numbers that are pretty close to the expected results, so I'm hoping that we have equations that will work.

 

In addition to my Data Analysis meeting, we have also been putting together a presentation for the lumber plant and engineering process managers.  I'm excited to hear their reaction to the program we have been developing.  

 

From a teacher perspective, this externship has taught me the value of project based learning.  I'm still struggling with how I can get my return on investment of the time it takes to students to work through one of these units.  I know from a student view that they are much more engaged when they get to apply the concepts.  It's my job to make sure it is content rich and challenging enough to justify the block of time that must be set aside.

 

I've really enjoyed my time here and feel that the project has some value.  Putting together the presentation this week has really given me a chance to look back over the 6 weeks and reflect on the challenges and successes.

"PBL Unit"

Pella Externship

Days 21-24

 

The past week has been great here at Pella.  It feels like we have some results that will be useful after I'm finished with my time.  For the most part, the last couple days have been cleaning up a few numbers and some formatting issues with the Excel program.  I've also been toying with the numbers to verify that the correlation we got was more than a fluke.  As I tie up the loose ends on the project, my attention turns a bit to my teacher responsibilities.

 

Last week in my meeting with Comfort, we discussed some of the challenges that teachers face in the new era of education.  She talked about the difficulty college professors had conveying the multitude of expectations that new teachers would be faced with once they took over their own classroom. 

I talked about the some of frustration I dealt with my first few years as an educator trying to meet the District requirements as well as the Professional Development Models we were expected to incorporate.  More recently, we've been asked to add the Common Core and the 21st Century Skills.  Somewhere in there I have to factor in the content I believe is important for success at the next level (which may be different for each student).

For new teachers it is more difficult as they face the task of establishing classroom expectations, mastering attendance, determining grading philosophy, and communicating with parents for the first time.

They are taught in college to teach for "depth" in their subject area with Problem Based Learning and the importance of Authentic work developed by each student, but given an impossible checklist of skills to be taught and mastered for the high stakes tests.

In the spirit of solving problems, not just identifying them, Comfort and I talked about the importance of combining enough different skills and standards into one project based unit as possible to justify the amount of days we planned to send on it.

In evaluating the unit I was building for this Externship, I decided it was worth some time this week to looked closely at the Standards for Instruction in the Common Core.

They are:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

4. Model with mathematics.

5. Use appropriate tools strategically.

6. Attend to precision.

7. Look for and make use of structure.

8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

I could honestly see most of these in the unit, but am still trying to improve some elements.

"Critical Thinking"

Pella Externship Days 18-20 It seems like the big pieces are falling into place.  Jeff, Mike, and I sat down yesterday to look over what we had so far.  The simulations we ran "felt right" based on the expected yields they already recover.  The big issues left to tackle are putting some polish on the finish product and finding some reasonable restraints to limit the amounts and types of lumber fed into the plant.  The only real hurdle I see left to overcome is that the simulations are suggesting a mix of lumber that is significantly different than what is currently run through the factory. The lesson to take back to the classroom this week is the importance of interpreting and making decisions based on the information you receive.  If we just took the results of the optimization tool and implemented them tomorrow, there would be serious consequences in supply availability, purchase requirements, and labor force needed.  This really brings home the "more than one right answer" issue for students.  While the program gives us its version of a best answer, the real decisions for the factory are complicated and have many considerations.  It is rewarding to hear about ways they plan to use the optimization program and the new perspective it might give to the way things have been done in the past.