Whole-Class Ideas for Asynchronous Flipped Mastery

When I think of moving to flipped-mastery I think of all the advantages; students moving at a pace right for them, meeting all of their individual needs, showing mastery instead of just moving on, etc. And I know that I will have students congealing into self-identified groups.  But what I don't want to lose are those whole-class group activities and conversations I've experienced from my traditionally run classroom.  And I want them to be much more in-depth and meaningful than I have done in the past.  I also want the ebb and flow of my classroom to be efficient and organic.

I think there are benefits to having whole-class discussions and activities that take the entire period, are short and sweet, and happen over the course of several days.  Therefore, I'm thinking about having a mix of all of these.  I also want to focus on perseverance with my students this year.  I believe they get stuck in a problem or don't even know how to start because they don't know what questions to ask.  I want to help them with that.  I also believe that they have difficulty finding their mistakes and seeing alternative routes to solutions.  I want to help them with that too.  

Since my students will be in different places due to being asynchronous I want to focus these discussions on the mathematical practices rather than on the content.  By that I mean these discussions don't have to be around the content in that unit or "paced out" for that day. I believe that I, as a teacher, have been stifled in trying to move to a more problem-solving  based classroom because I have always tried to find an activity/problem that correlated with a "standard" set for a particular day.  Rather than focusing on "does it fit in my curriculum" I'm giving myself permission to use anything that I think will help my students, regardless of the correlation to CCSS-M or pacing guide.

So here are some of the ideas I've been mulling around.  I'd love your thoughts and comments.

What's the Error?: Show a problem done incorrectly (from student work or our text, which surprisingly has a good number of these) and have students discuss in their groups what the error is and how to fix it.  These would correlate with the concepts being learned in the current unit. This would also give rise to discussions of alternate solutions depending upon the problem.

What's Your First Question?: Using Dan Meyer's 101 Questions show a picture or video and have students share the first question that comes to mind.  Here, there is no pressure to find the answers to the questions or do any "math" per se.  The idea I have is to build students' confidence and ability to ask questions which I think is so vitally important to perseverance.  Eventually some of these may be used to actually answer the questions posed in future class periods (via 3-Act Math - Dan Meyer style, see below) .

How Big Is It?: Using Andrew Stadel's Estimation 180 to help build students' number sense.  Show a picture and have students estimate how big something is or how much of it there is.  Let students work in groups and report out, not only their answers, but their methods as well.  Great use of constructing viable arguments and attending to precision.

Would You Rather?: Using John Steven's Would You Rather? give students a question to for which students must choose their answer and justify it. For example,  "Would you rather carry a bucket with 5.62 liters of water or carry a bucket with 1.85 gallons of water?".  These could lead to some great discussion about what information is necessary to answer the question and how do you find that information.  Which could break into some great learning opportunities regarding searching methods on the internet and unit conversions.

What's the Pattern?: Fawn Nguyen's Visual Patterns gives students the first three iterations of a pattern and asks them about the 43rd. I anticipate needing to give my students more than snippet of class time but learning to look for and make use of structure takes time.  And the opportunity for discussion of multiple solutions is rich.

Can You Create This?: Daily Desmos gives students a graph and asks them to use their online graphing calculator (or other) to create the graph.  Now some of these are rather complicated graphs and beyond what I think my students could do.  However, whose to say some student might not figure it out? And why does everything we ask students to do have to result in an "answer"? Can't the process itself be the point of it all? How much learning could take place if we give kids time to play with the graphs?  How much might they learn about domain and range even if they can't figure out the actual function that makes it? I think sometimes, play time is enough.

Over the summer I have been reading a bit about teaching with Dan Meyer's 3-Act Math  and I believe it to be a worthy thing to include in my class.   However, along with moving to flipped-mastery I am instituting 20% Time/Passion Projects with my students.  I have relegated one day a week toward this endeavor and feel that it will be difficult to take yet another class period for something like a 3-Act task. This all has me wondering if I couldn't divide the 3-Acts over several days.  Here's what I'm thinking...

Day 1: Introduce the problem (Act 1). What questions does the image/video give rise to in students? Document these.

Day 2: Focus on one question and discuss what information we need to answer it (Act 2).

Day 3-4: Work on answering the question.  

In essence this could be worked over the course of the week.  I believe there is benefit to wrestling with a problem, walking away, and coming back to it.  I can't tell you how many times I solved problems in the shower when I was in college because I took time to "walk away".

Well...those are the thoughts that have been rambling around in my brain.  I'm not sure how it will all pan out and I bet there are some future blog posts on whether or not they do.  I welcome your thoughts and ideas.  And if anyone is thinking along the same lines and wants to collaborate on developing specifics together, please let me know!