Butterfly Day

Early in the school year, I saw a video at a district meeting that got me thinking about things I could try in my classroom. The video, called “Austin’s Butterfly,” documents the reactions of several groups of students as they’re shown how a first grade boy named Austin improved his initial drawing of a butterfly through several attempts after receiving helpful feedback from his classmates. The improvement from his first drawing to the final version is remarkable.

Video: Austin's Butterfly

The first thing I thought upon seeing this is how it was a perfect analogy for revision, and the reason why writers benefit from working with critique partners as they try to improve a manuscript. It also made me feel a little disappointed that I don’t teach writing, since a video like this could be such a great way to illustrate to students how continuously trying to improve their work can make a difference, and how important it is to listen to the feedback others provide. Then I started thinking: Why does that only have to apply to writing? There must be some way I can bring that mindset into math.

The ideas of that video stayed in the back of my mind as the school year settled in. Later in the fall, my students took a math unit test, and, as is the case with many unit tests, the results were mixed. A test like this is supposed to represent how well they had mastered the skills we’d been studying, but not all students are going to learn in the same way or at the same rate. We still needed to move to a new unit to keep pace with the curriculum though, even if there were a number of kids in class who weren’t done learning those skills. 

It never seems right to think that a test taken in the middle of October should represent the total amount of learning any student does during an academic trimester when that trimester is only half over. After a few weeks of pondering what I could do to better address that problem, Butterfly Day was born. 

I began scheduling each Friday as a break from the current unit, giving the students a chance to spend that day practicing skills they had not yet mastered. Of course, having dozens of students in class means dozens of different academic needs to address. Instead of investing endless hours in spreadsheet analysis to determine which students should be practicing which skills (something I don’t always have tons of faith in), I presented them with a list of topics we had already studied: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, decimal operations, multi-step problem solving, data analysis, and place value. From there, they needed to do some self-assessment and decide which skill set would be the best for them to practice. Everyone made their choice and signed up for one of what we were calling Butterfly Groups, named after the concept of how working in these groups would give them opportunities to continue making improvements, much like young Austin did with his drawing. 

As the first Butterfly Day approached, I began to appreciate exactly how ambitious of an project this truly was: I would have to write six different lesson plans for one day, which small groups would be able to work through productively without much guidance since I’d be bouncing between groups the whole time, trying to keep everyone engaged while only able to spend a few minutes at a time checking in with each. 

When the first Butterfly Day arrived, the whole thing went surprisingly well. The students understood what to do and why they were doing it. They took ownership in what they had decided to learn. The activities were just enough outside of our routine to hold their attention. Both of my classes contain a good number of students who could be generously described as rambunctiously distracted, so it was gratifying to see them making the active choice to work on developing the skills they chose. 

The second week came, then the third. The classes began anticipating Butterfly Day and were excited when it arrived. The moment when I gave out the group assignments for the day became a big reveal. A few weeks into the routine, some people began telling me they didn’t feel they needed their groups anymore and were ready to work on different concepts. When I gave everyone the chance to rethink their group assignments, some chose to move on while many stayed where they were.

We continued on through the end of the trimester. Just before my grades were due, I wrote up a series of small tests, basically giving them second chances to demonstrate what they had learned about the skills they'd been studying in Butterfly Groups before I finalized report cards. Not everyone showed significant improvement, or much at all. But a lot of people did. In many cases, the improvement they showed was enough for me to raise them to a higher grade than what they’d earned back on their original unit test.

One of the things I noticed the most was how Butterfly Day affected my own energy level. A lot of time and effort goes into planning and preparing so a project like this will keep its momentum and success, but instead of feeling worn out from it, I was re-energized, particularly on the actual Butterfly Days themselves. I'll feed off of the gradual bits of success I see happening, and the authentic curiosity of the questioning taking place, and the mostly cooperative nature of the groups. I’m not going to say everything has gone perfectly, but in the overview I’ve been happily surprised by how effective the idea has been and how widely the students have embraced it. For the past several Fridays, I’ve been going home feeling invigorated instead of exhausted.

We just returned from winter break and started with new groups, most of which are based around fractions and decimals, since that was the big part of the last test we took. A lot of kids walked away from that test feeling they had significant gaps in their knowledge until we looked at things from the long view. When they realized they still had time to keep improving, they began self-assessing what they needed to work on the most. We generated seven group topics for this round. Neither class ended up using all seven groups — the rule was that a group had to have at least two people signed up for it or it would be closed off as an option. A big part of what they were doing, I reminded them, was benefitting from the feedback they’d receive from working with other people.

As I pointed that out, I had an uncomfortable moment upon realizing I hadn’t given them much specific direction on HOW to provide the kind of helpful feedback they’d need from each other. To address that, I started building a new activity into their daily warm-up routine: I’d write an example problem, with a correct solution, on the board for them to examine. There’s nothing specifically wrong with what I show them, other than the strategies I use may not be the most efficient or logical or coherent ways to arrive at a solution. Their job with this is to analyze my work and tell me what they notice about it. This week we managed to have a fifteen-minute discussion about the choices I made in one division problem and one multiplication problem. Having that experience as a touchstone made it a lot easier for me to remind them about the kind of feedback they could offer each other once we made it to Butterfly Day. 

That’s just the beginning, though. Whenever I’ve had ideas like this in the past, they usually start out with a first try, followed by any number of changes or tweaks needed along the way to make things better — not so unlike a first grader drawing six versions of a butterfly before he really gets it right. In that spirit, I think I’m going to at least semi-regularly blog about where Butterfly Day takes my classes throughout the rest of the year, as a record for my own reference as much as anything else. 

I should probably cut this post off, because I have a week of lesson plans to write (including seven for the next Butterfly Day) and some reading I need to get to this weekend about training students how to better provide feedback.

The ideas and practices can always be improved.