Continuous Improvement

One of the roles that I filled while working at Lockheed Martin was to act as a Green Belt Trainer for the Lean Six Sigma program.  As part of this program I got to work with adult learners and discover how they learned (amazingly very similar to children) and teach them about how to work to make continuous improvements to the products and support that we provided the Special Ops Forces.  

Now in teaching, I feel like every day I am working to continuously improve everything I do for the success of my students.  

Today we finished our first unit on Equations, and miraculously I survived as did most of the students!  After the test, I asked everyone to provide their "Plus/Deltas".  (This was an activity that I was familiar with from our Green Belt trainings and was an activity that we sometimes used to close the day.  However, as I sat here tonight typing in and consolidating the responses my husband asked "You asked the kids what they thought?"  I replied "Yes" and he said "No one ever asked me what I thought or what helped me...." and I wondered if that is one of the reasons he has struggled so hard at school in his adult life, because no one ever asked.  But a different topic for a different day.)

The input I received I have been overwhelmed at how positive and insightful it has been.  I expected to read "Mrs. Snell is mean" and "This class stinks", but have read no such items.  Most of the feedback has been extremely self-reflective and indicated that many of the kids knew that they could have done better if they had studied more/worked harder/practiced more/etc.  I have learned that while most have loved some of the movement activities we have done over the past couple of weeks, some have not liked them.  Such is the struggle with so many diverse learners.

But overall, I feel reaffirmed and blessed to have so many wonderful students and look forward to how I can make learning and math better for them over the coming months!