Deliberate Practice with Mild, Medium & Spicy Problems

As a high school teacher homework is a constant battle.

At my high school it’s an equity issue. Many of my students lack the time, space and resources to complete homework.

But also, we also know that the fundamental differentiator between excellence and mediocracy is discipline and deliberate practice. And on a very fundamental level “use it or lose it”. So how to ensure practice and ensure it in a way where learning is happening for all students?

Enter Mild, Medium and Spicy questions.

I picked this idea up from Peter Liljidahl when he joined our nationwide physics book study in April on his book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. He’s been researching this type of practice most recently in classrooms and I was finally ready to give it a try.

I knew that my students needed some extra practice on calculating quantities from kinematic graphs. They just weren’t quite there yet. I could have assigned problems. If I did, I’d get a 25-50% completion rate and mostly students who did not need the practice provided.

Instead, I did the following:

1) I made a variety of position, velocity and acceleration vs time graphs. Mild graphs had one segment, medium had 2 and spicy had 3 or more. Then, I wrote out the solutions to all of the problems. I put the problems up with tape on 3 individual whiteboard for the three flavors. The answers were on a cabinet on the other side of the room

2) We reviewed the previous week’s quiz and identified that this was the area that needed work. I explained to students they could choose the problems, gave them a paper to document their work, and pointed out the answers were provided.

3) I kid you not, I had 100% of students working for 100% of the hour.. to the point where my last class of the day (who normally line up early) were shocked that the bell rang!

Why it works:

1)Taste vs Aptitude Instead of “levels” the questions are sorted by “flavor” there is something psychologically motivating about choosing your preference rather than feeling pigeonholed by ability.

2) Do What you need – give students a task with a number of items and they want to finish as quickly as possible. Alternatively, the task is overwhelming and they don’t even begin. A single graph at a time, that is student selected (hello autonomy!) is manageable. There’s no pressure! No pressure to complete a spicy, no pressure to complete x number of problems. Just do what you need. I had two students go for the spiciest spicy. I made a comment about it and they asked me if they did it correctly if they needed to do more. Ironically, because it was so complex they were going to end up doing 7 different problems in the process anyway!

3) Get to the deep stuff – honestly, the best part of this for me were the conversations I heard students having. Some of them would get into heated arguments about the correct answer, even though they could have just looked. But just looking was like skipping to the end of the movie. The puzzle was more important than the answer. (I’m going to remind folks real quick that this is NOT my AP course)

4) Student Wins – I heard several students comment that day “I feel smart in this class.” and I cannot tell you how big of a statement that is coming from this group of students. If you know, you know.

• Have any of you tried anything like this?
• How do you deal with the homework problem?
• What are you thinking about regarding this idea?