by In my never ending quest to create a better math program that helps more kids learn more math I created the Animal Emoji system at the end of last year. Now that we have completed a quarter of the new school year I thought that it was a good time to assess how it’s going so far. The short answer is great!!!
This is my tenth year into my second go round as a math teacher. I have to admit that my first year was a bit of a struggle after being out of the classroom for over a decade but by the start of year two I was already looking for ways to create an island of success in the stormy sea that was math education. One of the systems that I tried to implement early on was having students learn math in teams. I knew that this was the way to go but I quickly found out that just making kids sit together didn’t mean they were going to work together in a meaningful way. Fortunately, we soon adopted CPM which was totally based on Team Math. They have an awesome professional development program and thus I had some guidance and a plan so that I could help kids work together effectively and my team math program really started to become an effective vehicle for student learning. Of course that was just the beginning, since then over a dozen layers have been added, massaged and vetted with the newest one being the Animal Emoji system.
CPM uses four person teams and team roles: Recorder/Reporter, Task Manager, Resource Manager and Facilitator. They all had their own duties and roles to play within the team to keep the team firing on all cylinders. Every year I would start by saying that this would be the year I make the team roles really work and every year I just couldn’t. Last year was only different in the fact that half way through I came home from the CPM conference with a sneak peak at the new revised roles. I once again thought I’ll give it a try. Unfortunately, when I finally had time to look at them I decided they weren’t for me. The true purpose of Team roles is to keep everyone on the team engaged and doing math and the new roles were even more complicated than the old ones so I came up with a different way: The Animal Emoji.
I want to find some identifying characteristics that didn’t offend, judge or degrade students so I thought let’s give animal emojis a shot. I picked a dozen of them and had all of my students vote on their favorites. Much to my surprise the rainbow unicorn didn’t make the cut but these did: 🐼🐳🦋🐧Now that I had an identifier I started to flush out the roles. First I started to assign duties to them like the old CPM roles but quickly decided not to. Instead, I just tried to write a little blurb about each animal that would exemplify positive characteristics for success in my program that I could attach to each animal and came up with these. I laminated them, cut them up and taped one at each corner of their tables.
Long ago Psychologists found out that if you wanted to sway opinion it was much better to ask a question rather than tell an answer, hence the question. Does it actually help them embody that characteristic? Honestly it feels like they are having a positive effect but we will see. The blurbs are just an additional benefit (hopefully) to the general purpose. Here is how they are really designed to help.
The real purpose of the emoji’s are to give each team member specific tasks to do and thus ensure their engagement. If the is a 🐧 in front of a paragraph then 🐧 reads aloud. If there is a 🦋 in front of a problem then 🦋is at the board with the marker. Of course they have their team to help them but they are the ones writing it up on the board.
For example:
🐼Think about the parent function for parabolas, y=x^2
🐳a. On your board write the equation of a parabola that will be the same as the parent graph, but shifted 4 units to the right.
🦋b. Does the strategy you used to translate parabolas horizontally also work for other parent graphs? Justify your answer.
Our daily work is broke up into discovery problems as above and review preview problems like the one below where every team member has a problem to do on the board:
🦋For the graph of each function, what are the intercepts and the locator point (h,k)? Sketch a graph of each function and state the domain and the range.
🐧y=|x-4| -2
🐼y=|x+1| -2
🐳y=|x-3| +2
🦋y=|x+4| +3
Of course there are other parts of my program that they are integrated into as well but I think you get the idea.
The question is does it help more kids learn more math? Now I can definitively say yes it does. It is a beautiful thing when we start off and I say “Pandas read” and you can hear every team reading out loud. No arguing, no time wasting, just everyone starts and then the next person reads etc etc. The engagement is so much better and seamless. Everyone knows what to do and when to do it. There was a very short learning curve as well. At this point everything is pretty automatic and even if someone does need a little encouragement it doesn’t seem personal and it’s quick “Who’s the butterfly?” etc. In fact it works so well that I keep kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner.
