Around the Hall becomes Around the Room

I find that self-checking and self-paced activities work really well in my Algebra 1A course. One of

these types of activities involves placing problems on the wall that have answers above them to another
one of the problems that is on the wall. Each problem needs to be completed in a certain order. The

students complete the activity by choosing one problem to complete. When they find the answer to the
first problem, they look at all the other problems that are on the wall and their answer will be on top of one

of the other problems. That problem will be the next problem they complete and so on, until they get back
to their original problem. If they don’t get an answer that is above one of the other problems, then they

know they made a mistake and reevaluate their work.

This is a great activity and worked well in terms of completing the work, but there were a few issues.
The first was that I originally had students complete the activity in the hallway. The main issue was that

students did not complete the assignment all at the same time. From this came two problems. One was
that students that finished went back into the classroom, and then I had students in the hall and in the

classroom and had to go back and forth between locations until everyone finished. The other problem with
this was that I did not have a plan for the students that finished early, so they were left with nothing to

occupy their time.

To adjust for these issues, I did two things. The first was to move the hung-up sheets into the walls

of classroom instead of the hallway. The second was to plan activities for students that finish early. One of
these such activities is to use the quick check formative assessment tool of whiteboards. With these I can

put random on content problems on the board using Kuta Software for the students to complete on the
whiteboards. With this, I can quickly check their work while still helping the students with the prior

assignment. I have tried this adjustment and it has worked well.

There is still some room for improvement though. One thing I may try in the future is to give a
student the responsibility of randomizing the new problem, to allow me to focus more on what the students

are doing, and also giving responsibility to a student.