Channeling

I've mentioned this to Rachel and Sam before-- when I teach, there are moments when I'm clearly "channeling" the voice of Matty ("I think we need to tease this apart"), Paul ("so it sounds like you're saying... did I get that right?"), and David ("but that's important, right?" - actually it's harder to channel David- probably b/c I've never seen him teach physics). My "channeling" for classroom management comes in part from scripts from PCP and even Teach Like a Champion.

Monday, Stamatis said, while the group was working through the energy transfer from the road to the car, "is the energy of the ground at the end of Act Two greater than, less than, or equal to the beginning of Act Two?"* (I'll work to track down the video moment because that might not be an exact quote.) This is the kind of sentence that would rarely (if ever) come up in everyday conversations or between people trying to figure out a bit of science - and not among practicing scientists doing science. The precise wording and the ">, <, =" options suggest a school question; more precisely, it sounds like a written question, and even a test question. More precisely still, I think, "Aha! A UW-trained educator channeling tutorial pretests!" But what does it mean to channel a tutorial? What kind of conversation would that be? Is Stamatis trying to have us re-create a tutorial through discourse? - the chain of logic and reasoning from a tutorial could never be recreated without knowing the punchline first, could it? My sense was he was trying to get a "consensus" - some commitment from the class on something that we could build on. And if he's not trying to recreate a tutorial, then is there a mismatch between the framing that the question suggests and the intended path of the discussion?

It makes me think (again) that while a tutorial is excellent at developing certain kinds of conceptual understanding, it doesn't provide a template -- not for students and not for teachers -- for developing their own understanding about some topic for which there is no tutorial. It doesn't provide us a script to "channel" that will get us out of our pickle, except by someone who already knows the way out. I hope that my instruction provides such scripts - scripts that help you navigate unknown territory. (I channel Polya: "okay - there's a problem here we can't solve. So we need to find an easier problem that we can." and David: "what would a reasonable person who disagrees with you say? what is wrong about their reasoning?") I've seen such channeling by my students towards the end of the semester, and feel that it has been really productive in getting them to move themselves forward.

So I'm back to thinking about outside-in v. inside-out curriculum and instruction.** Today (Tuesday) Stamatis put on the projector some questions (from Minstrell?) about a student's written comments:

• what do the students seem to be saying?
• what are productive aspects of student thinking?
• what might be problematic aspects of student thinking?
• what cognitive need to the students seem to have?
• what activity might you design for them?
  
• how does the activity meet the need?

These questions are inherently outside-looking-in (3, 4, and 5). You cannot answer them without knowing where exactly it is you want them to go conceptually and a particular chain of reasoning (monologic) that will get you there.



*Those weblinks are mostly just me joking around. (You don't need to read Matty's twitter updates.) But it is telling that "greater than, less than, or equal to" has google hits that are overwhelmingly school-related.

**Those images suggest I'm thinking "down-from-above" v. "in the thick of things."