blogs in math?!?!

Currently I am in the process of starting my action research. After two months of student teaching, my students have shown difficulty providing strong written reflections on their weekly blogs. In these blogs they are to reflect on 7 habits of a mathematician: create a rule (generalize), conjecture and test, be systematic and organized, solve simpler and related problems, justify and support, look for patterns and regularity, be confident and persistent, experiment and play. More specifically, they are to reflect on how they used one or more of these habits in the class activities or in any other setting. These habits of a mathematician are not used in any other classroom. At the beginning of the school year the students held a class discussion on what they taught it meant to be a mathematician. Together, with the teachers help, they came up with these 7 habits and have been using them since the start of the fall semester.

By "strong" I mean that their quality of writing is at different levels. Also the effort students were putting into them varied. Some wrote thorough reflections on how they acted like a mathematician but other did the bare minimum with one or two sentences. In addition, of the 74 students about 28-33 of them are actually turning one in. The turn in rate of these blogs was definitely something that stood out to me and made me curious as to why all of this was happening. 

To address this need, I conducted a discussion in which the students reflected on the following two questions: What is the purpose of the blog? How has the blog influenced your learning? The intension for these questions was to see if the students knew why they were writing these blogs on a weekly basis. Some of the responses the students said to the first question were: "to show that we learned", "for you to check in on our understanding", and only one person said"to reflect of the habits of a mathematician". In response to the second question many began by saying that it was beneficial. Some statements were "yes because I realize I really do know the material", "I understand the problem better", and "I think deeper about the problem". However, when I asked if everyone felt this way some people said no. So I then began to ask why. Their general feelings were that doing a blog on the same questions every week felt repetitive and wanted to try something new. The question of “what can make writing the blogs a more meaningful experience?” became crucial to the conversation as many expressed that they would like to have a variety of prompts to write about. Some wanted open ended problems, some just wanted more than one option to write about, and some wanted questions related to what we were working on that week. All there responses have really made me rethink my action research approach and feel like I am back at step one....developing a main question and subquestions.