Writing a “By the End of”

At this point in the school year, as we head into April vacation, my colleague and I have written and planned most of the “By the End of” sheets we need.  But, especially in our Extended class, sometimes we find something else we need to design.  Since we just found two, one on using median and IQR to determine meaningful difference and one on literal equations, I thought it might be useful to have some screenshots that document the process we go through to develop a “By the End of” hyperdoc.

Backward Design

We begin, as we always do in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), with the curriculum standards.  The idea of teaching median and IQR came from my colleague’s insistence on researching and determining whether or not we were actually teaching the standards, or if we were maybe teaching Eureka math’s understanding of/version of the standards.  Although we decided not to change to Illustrative Math’s version/interpretation at this point (teaching both mean/MAD and median/IQR), on a Friday night when the copier was broken and we would be trying to teach this on Monday, the conversation did raise a few points:

1. We needed to find a way to have the students work with IQR and median to determine a meaningful difference.  Eureka only teaches mean and Mean Absolute Deviation.  Since all our plans and assessments were designed using Eureka, we decided to stick with that for this year, with the hope we would get summer work time to explore Illustrative.
2. That meant that we would teach the median/IQR piece, but after the assessment (which was based on Eureka).  As my colleague looked through the Illustrative materials, she threw out topics that the students would need to know prior to being able to work with the Illustrative materials.
3. As that list grew, I took notes and started looking for resources on those topics, such as calculating and understanding IQR, calculating median, and how to read/create a box-and-whisker plot.
4. At that point, I realized it would be logical and efficient to encapsulate the material with a “By the End of” hyperdoc, since we knew the overarching material we wanted the students to work with, but we were also beginning to generate a an overwhelming collection of resources and materials.

First Draft

Here is a screenshot of the first draft, an “in-progress” draft, of the “By the End of” (Center and Variability).

At this point, there is mostly “short-hand” here, not a finished product (as you can see).  But we have captured the brainstorming we were doing, as well as beginning to sort out the material by purpose or level of importance–what will be skill building, what will be application, what will be required, what will be “do to mastery.”

Revision History

After a closer look at the materials and some revision, our second version looked like this:

We wrote Essential Questions, always an excellent way to cross-check the validity of what we think we are doing.  We also added vocabulary and cleaned up the Work and Resources sections.  We felt there was enough work as given, so we dropped the Illustrative extension, although it may come back in future iterations.

And you thought you were done!

We photocopied the “By the End of” (Center and Variability) as seen above.  About 24 hours later, we got an email from our math coach with a Desmos link on box plots!  The beauty of this hyperdoc, especially when used in a classroom culture that includes an expectation that students will access electronic documents as a resource, is that it can be easily updated:

As we try this out with the students, we will revise accordingly.