Teaching Seminar, Seventh Session - paying attention to student thinking

I am back from maternity leave and attending teaching seminars again, and catching up with what I've missed in the last few months.

Apparently in the last teaching seminar, participants looked at and discussed the whiteboards about energy from Chris's class. Rachel started tonight by reminding them of this, and pointing out that they had a lot of questions about how what they saw on the whiteboards was generated, which they couldn't get from just looking at the final products. To help them answer some of these questions, today they watched a video of students generating one of these whiteboards (the first one shown in the blog post linked above). It was a 12-minute video, too long to watch the whole thing all the way through, so Rachel asked them to stop it when they saw something they wanted to discuss. As it turned out, no one ever stopped it except Rachel. The way the evening went was that we would watch a few minutes of video, Rachel would stop it, they would discuss it in small groups, then report back to the whole group, then repeat, until we'd watched the whole video.

One of the goals of the Teaching Seminar is to encourage teachers to pay attention to student thinking. Judging from the conversations I heard in the group we were taping, I think we're making some progress. Last year we spent a lot of time asking teachers to discuss students' written work, and I found the video painful to watch: there was a lot of bitching about how dumb students are, and not a lot of curiosity about their thinking. What I saw today was that teachers were desperately curious about student thinking. They were going bonkers trying to figure out why the students were doing what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how to modify the activity to find out more about student thinking. They were frustrated that the students weren't articulate about their thinking, and wanted to find more ways to draw them out. Some of their ideas for how to learn more about student thinking were not very good. For example, they suggested asking students to present their whiteboards, imagining that in a presentation they would suddenly lay out all their thoughts clearly in a way they hadn't in the small groups (whereas I always find I learn more by listening to small group discussions than polished final presentations). When they were told that these students did present their white boards at the end of class, they begged to see the video of the presentations. Then they watched it and had to grapple with the realization that it wasn't very enlightening.

It seems to me that at least some of the teachers have really gained a new appreciation for the value of paying close attention to the value of student thinking. But they are still figuring out how to go about actually finding out what students are thinking. This is a great place to be. A lot of progress, and a lot of potential for further development.