AYPD third session

Stamatis started class last night by framing our video-watching in terms of the formative assessment cycle (Collect data - Interpret - Plan action - Implement), emphasizing that what we're doing in these sessions is in the "interpret" category, and that we want to rein in our impulse to jump straight to "planning action."  We (the teachers and instructors) revisited the guidelines we wanted to impose on ourselves as we watched video together:  here's what they said:

This is all well and good, but I felt (and continue to feel...) that we are going to slip up, and we need to plan how we're going to call ourselves on that, because it's not easy.  In advance, I came up with two ideas:

• A couple people should be designated to pay special attention to whether we're following our guidelines.  Maybe we could call them "refs."  There should be one or two "refs" for whole-class discussions, and maybe a "table ref" for each small group as well.  The refs should not be the instructors.
• Because I sometimes find it hard to verbalize an objection in circumstances like this, I thought it might help if there could be a nonverbal signal, like a bell or a popper.  I wound up making these very dorky little flags from some cheap dowels, polyester knit fabric, and binder clips:

I need a haircut.  But I think the flags are way fun.  In class, I gave every table one or two flags and explained what they were for, but I forgot about designating refs.

The video we watched was what I think of as the "nail video," in which two PET students create a white board showing their initial model of a magnetized nail.  Out of respect to Valerie I'm not going to post the video here, but you can read about my analysis of that video on sciencegeekgirl, who liveblogged my AAPT presentation.  Needless to say it's a video that I have thought about a lot.  Nonetheless, the teachers gave me new insight.  In talking about what metaphors the participants seemed to be using for energy, I had already thought about a "container metaphor" (energy is in objects, like water is in a cup) and an "activation metaphor" (in which energy "turns on" an object).  The teachers raised two other ideas that were relatively new to me:

(1) An idea I almost want to call "actualization" or "fulfillment," where energy helps an object become what it is particularly meant to be: magnetizable things become magnets, stretchy things get stretched, lights turn on, movable things get moving. This might be a specialized kind of activation, in which an object is energized into fulfilling its particular destiny. The Creation of Adam picture, which I have used to illustrate "activation," might just as well be illustrating "fulfillment," since presumably what happens to Adam is special to Adam. I didn't have the Sistine Chapel image handy, so I drew it on the board... how'd I do?

(Stamatis said, "Oh, Rachel, the Vatican is calling," and I said, "What, they need their ceiling painted?" and it was seeming like a good time, but one of the teachers was turned off by the religious imagery.  oh well.)

(2) An idea we referred to as the "Tea Flavor" metaphor, in which the energy is infused into an object the way tea flavor is infused into water, or peach flavor infused into vodka. This is different from the metaphor in which the energy is like water and the object is like a cup, because it captures the sense that energy can permeate solid objects and changes their quality without adding mass or volume. One teacher observed that this is very much how we think of charge, which the students in the video had previously mentioned as being related to their model for magnetism. Ooo! However, we noted that the students in the video very much like the word stored for describing the energy, and that you do not store tea flavor by making tea, whereas you do store water by putting it in a cup.

I enjoyed the conversation a lot and I made sure to tell them loudly that they had given me new insight, never mind that I had watched this episode probably 100 times, analyzed it, presented it at a national meeting, etc.

Meanwhile, the conversation management.  Most of the conversation was appropriate and followed our guidelines.  However I am sorry to say that even after all our negotiating and clarifying and flag distributing, there were a number of problems:

1. The first thing anyone said about the video in the whole-class discussion was something like, "They're doing a misguided analysis that isn't going to get them anywhere."  Judgment, insult, speculation, not grounded in the video, you name it.  
2. No one called that guy on what he said.  I waited a few beats and then I had to stop it so I waved my flag, but I am very disappointed that it had to be me.
3. Calling that guy out was not so simple.  He didn't get why he was being challenged, so then I was in the position of in some sense striking him down, and some of me didn't want to be doing that.  However, I also felt strongly that I had to show everyone else in the room that the kind of thing he was saying would not be tolerated, that they themselves would be protected from that when it was their turn.  This was not easy for me.
4. The next guy who spoke, who attempted to clarify what the first guy had said, was just as far off at first ("They're using a line of argument that has nothing to do with a magnetic model"), but when I kept saying "What observation are you making?" he eventually reduced his statement to:  "They are talking about energy."  It was really something to me, to see how when you stripped off all the insult and speculation, there was almost nothing left to what he had said.
5. In the entire whole-class conversations, the above was the only flag-waving, i.e. nobody waved a flag but me.  

I wonder if it might have been better if I had remembered to designate a ref.  I hear there was some helpful flag-waving within the small groups.  I wish I had left more time at the end of class for reflecting on our process.  

Carl Rogers

I have been discovering Carl Rogers.  I got started because I was wondering who, in our intellectual or cultural history, is responsible for the idea that attending empathetically to another person's thinking has great benefits for both the one who is attended and the one doing the attending.  In discussing this with Sam and Hunter during the Portland AAPT meeting, I got to thinking about psychotherapy and did a little research.  It seems that our present conception of psychotherapy as an empathetic practice was pioneered by Carl Rogers, who called what he did "client-centered therapy" (and later, "person-centered therapy").  Here is a short description of his influence:

Certain ideas that Rogers championed have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to recall how fresh, even revolutionary, they were in their time.  Freudian psychoanalysis, the prevailing model of mind at mid-century, held that human drives – sex and aggression – were inherently selfish, constrained at a price and with difficulty by the forces of culture.  Cure, in the Freudian model, came through a relationship that frustrated the patient, fostering anxiety necessary for the patient to accept the analyst’s difficult truths.  Rogers, in contrast, believed that people need a relationship in which they are accepted.  The skills that the Rogerian therapist uses are empathy – a word that in Freud’s time was largely restricted to the feelings with which an observer invests a work of art – and “unconditional positive regard.”  Rogers stated his central hypothesis in one sentence:  “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”  By growth, Rogers meant movement in the direction of self-esteem, flexibility, respect for self and others.

From Rogers comes our contemporary emphasis on self-esteem and its power to mobilize a person’s other strengths. Rogers’s understanding of acceptance as the ultimate liberating force implies that people who are not ill can benefit from therapy and that nonprofessionals can act as therapists; the modern self-help group arises quite directly from Rogers’s human potential movement.  That marriage, like therapy, depends on genuineness and empathy is basic Carl Rogers.  It is Rogers, much more than Benjamin Spock, who speaks for nondirective parenting and teaching.

That's an excerpt from the prologue to the 1989 edition of Rogers's best-known book,  On Becoming a Person.  The book itself is a great read.  Rogers has a warm, personable voice, and the things he is saying, wow.  I want to take a bath in them.  Here is an excerpt I like:

I come now to a central learning which has had a great deal of significance for me.  I can state this learning as follows:  I have found it of enormous personal value when I can permit myself to understand another person.  The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you.  Is it necessary to permit oneself to understand another?  I think that it is.  Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear form other people is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it.  When someone expresses some feeling or attitude or belief, our tendency is, almost immediately, to feel “That’s right”; or “That’s stupid”; “That’s abnormal”; “That’s unreasonable”; “That’s incorrect”; “That’s not nice.”  Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of his statement is to him.  I believe this is because understanding is risky.  If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding.  And we all fear change.  So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into his frame of reference.  It is also a rare thing.

This excerpt seems to me to have everything to do with teachers and students.  When students express some "feeling or attitude or belief" about a physics situation, our immediate tendency is to judge it.  We don't even really know what the person is trying to say, but already we're saying "That's wrong," or "That sounds right," or "This makes no sense."  Not only about physics, either... I am struggling with my tendency to instantly evaluate what the teachers say about teaching and learning, without really understanding it.  And I think that one reason it is hard to take the trouble to understand a student's approach to physics, or a different teacher's approach to teaching, is that it puts our own expertise at risk.  We already know how we think of it.  If we permit ourselves to truly understand another person's physics thinking, we might be changed by that understanding, and that would mean we didn't have all the answers already.  Scary.

Here is another excerpt:

The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate.  It is this.  The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to rush in to "fix things."  As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex processes of life.  So I become less and less inclined to hurry in to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go.  I am much more content simply to be myself and let another person be himself.  I know very well that this must seem like a strange, almost an Oriental point of view.  What is life for if we are not going to do things to people?  What is life for if we are not going to mold them to our purposes?  What is life for if we are not going to teach them the things that we think they should learn?  What is life for if we are not going to make them think and feel as we do?  How can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing?  I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you.

Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up.  It is a very paradoxical thing -- that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be himself, then he finds not only himself changing; but he finds that other people to whom he relates are also changing.  At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life.

This one snuck up on me, so familiar and then boom, so cosmic.  What is life for?  But I think he's right about how deeply radical it is to not be trying to fix people all the time, and how paradoxically transformative it can be.  The LAs in the Physics Interview Project (sometimes) find that when they can just let people be, and stay engaged with them in an accepting way, they observe amazing things, and even watch amazing changes take place.  Here are some things that LAs have said in their reflection papers that seem to me to be related (the names are pseudonyms):

Although I was responding, my responses were limited to illuminating questions and I gave no feedback about the accuracy or validity of any of her thought processes. This gave her the time and freedom to really think about her answers and freed her from defending them. This time to process without judgment and the freedom to change her mind resulted in just that; she changed her mind. – Ivy 

I enjoy understanding and tend to find fulfillment in knowing what and how much I can comprehend. To focus not on the correct answer but on trying to understand a person’s possibly incorrect view of physics was a challenge. Because I put so much personal emphasis on my own learning and reasoning abilities, hearing someone else speak falsely of a subject which I understand makes me want to correct them, feeling that everyone would always want to understand and know more, as I always do. – Tara 

In non-teaching situations, asking questions grants respect to others by allowing them to express their own ideas free from distortion that may result from a person’s particular perspective or opinion. Allowing space for others to talk about their thoughts, along with the experiences and emotions that have influenced their thinking, gives value to the person and their thinking. In addition, it affords the person asking the questions an ability to cultivate empathy or compassion for the individual, or simply a richer perspective on the topic discussed. – Sandra

Now I think that LAs are able to think this way partly because of the influence of Carl Rogers on American psychology.

You can see Rogers in action on YouTube, conducting a filmed therapy session with a woman named Gloria.  Take half an hour and watch all five parts.

AYPD second session

The second AYPD session was October 5, 2010.  It was tricky to plan what to do, because we absolutely had to address what happened in the last session, but of the 25 people that were there, only 6 RSVP'd for this night, plus 8 people that weren't there last time.  Here was our short version agenda:

I. How do we make our classrooms safe environments for our students to talk?
II. How do we make our own community a safe place for each of us to talk?
III. How do we make these sessions a safe place for people to share video of their own classroom?

Stamatis started class with this set of x-ray images from the new machines in use at airports.  On the one hand, we may feel safer knowing that there aren't major weapons allowed on airplanes, but on the other hand, we may feel uncomfortable knowing that the TSA is seeing through our clothes.

After some discussion, we had them write privately about an event from their own classroom in which they suspected a student may have felt uncomfortable in a way that interfered with learning, and then had them read Chapter 5 of a Faber and Mazlish book, "How to Talk so Kids Can Learn" (very much in the spirit of "How to Talk So Kids Can Listen and Listen So Kids Can Talk," a book I recommend not only to parents but to pretty much everyone).

In the discussion of III, we of course had last week as a case in point.  We had the teachers who were there tell the teachers who weren't there what they remembered happening (in small groups).  With all the framing of the first 1.5 hours of class, the teachers in the room immediately knew that there had been evaluation of the lesson and that that was not what we wanted to be doing. They knew that would not be safe for them, if it were their turn.  Then we played them the video of the painful two minutes and ouch, there it was, looking pretty bad, and they all winced and said "We really need to not do that." (Serendipitously, the offenders in the video happened to be off camera *and* not present in class the second night, so it was helpfully nonspecific as far as the people who spoke.  Whew.)  Stamatis, who was running tonight's class, explained why he had not called a halt to it at the time -- it was the very end of class, it was providing material for us to negotiate the norms for these discussions, etc.  Then I said, "How about if I explain why I didn't interrupt it, since I was running the discussion that night," and he nodded, and I said.... all of it.  Here's my best recollection:

"I didn't stop it because.... it was me.  It was my classroom, it was my curriculum, I co-wrote the worksheet, it is a published curriculum that was the outcome of a funded project with my University of Maryland colleagues, it's my stuff. The reason I didn't interrupt the discussion was that I was so overwhelmed by what had been said that I couldn't think. I can't believe how calm I look on the video, because at that moment, I was just, 'gaaahhh.'  I just tried to say something that would sound somewhat normal.  But I was totally overwhelmed."

They were very surprised.  Hands went up to thank me and tell me that I was courageous for being so open.  There was a huge vibe in the room that it was very wrong, what had happened, that they really felt for me, and that we needed to take steps together to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again.  People said great things about how what we need to do is describe and observe what is on the video, and to really stay away from not only evaluating and judging, but also from speculating about "what might have happened if," etc.  People asked me if I was literally in that classroom on the video and I explained that no, I wasn't, but I was in similar classrooms that year, and I was responsible for training the TAs, so I was really very identified.

I admit, I had been stressing about the second session ever since the first session, and it was such a relief to come out.  I felt like a human being.  I even told them I had had the stack of DVDs ready to give away which I had quietly put back in their box.  Now, I feel bonded to them.  They know me now, in a way I have not been known up to this point.  I don't feel worried about my legitimacy so much now.

Also I think it was an incredibly powerful basis for establishing norms for future discussion.  No way is anyone who was there going to stand for (what we now recognize as) hurtful talk.  Those who were there agreed that they had a special responsibility to convey this important consensus to the people who weren't there tonight.  What better outcome?

Eventually, we even talked about the critiques themselves, and how they actually were not terrible suggestions, really worth considering, if they could be restated in a way that did not completely shut down the hearer.

The only bummer is that when I went to collect my cameras, there were dead batteries all over the place, in multiple microphones.  It might be that we lost the audio.  I still don't know, because haven't caught up on the video processing yet.

AYPD first session

The first AYPD session was on September 20, 2010.  Because we don't have any video of the teachers' own classrooms yet, we will spend the first few sessions watching other video - some from the Open Source Tutorials collection, some from Valerie, some from the summer, etc.  This will also give us some time to establish norms for discussing each other's video before any of the teachers is on the hot seat. We decided to show some Open Source Tutorials video first, because that's my stuff, so we can put ourselves out there first.  Also, I'm very comfortable leading discussions of that video, so it reduced my anxiety.  I thought it might be a bonus for some of the teachers that the instructional materials and the video collection are freely available, so I brought a box of the OST DVDs with me that night.  Here's one of the videos we discussed:

For over an hour we had a terrific conversation of this episode and one other episode of the same group.  Like the OST video discussions I am used to, it was full of interesting observations, claims, values, questions, and so on.  I was feeling pretty happy with the whole thing.  Then, right at the very very end of class, this happened.  The first speaker, who is off-camera, is an elementary science coach.  The second speaker is an elementary teacher who was sitting at the same table.  (There are a couple seconds of silence at the start - persist!)

Rachel:  Go ahead, and then I'm going to wind this up.

K:  One last thing.  Coming from the elementary, we do this a lot, but I kept thinking what kind of scaffolding is there around this room for them as they're having this conversation?  Just like, in an elementary classroom teachers would have all the forms of energy that they've been learning about, all the stuff they've been drawing and so forth, hearing about in lecture, on a chart somewhere.  To direct them back, "are we even talking about the energy right now?  or are we mixing that up with force, or work, or..."  And so, I just, so often, you know, the kids they don't have a lot of scaffolding.  They're just in a room with a worksheet to fill out and talking to each other and just, it seemed like they could have used... 

C:  And, I saw nothing that indicated any mental stimulation here.  They were discussing but there was nothing hands on, there were no analogies that they could make, there were no comparisons they could make with perhaps some prior knowledge.  What if it wasn't a person pushing against a wall, what if it was a machine?

Rachel: So that's the sort of analogy you would have liked to have seen.

I remember that I began to hit the ceiling (internally.... it is amazing to me how calm I look on video) when C said, "I saw nothing that indicated any mental stimulation."  What is she saying - the students are morons?  Comatose?  At "nothing hands-on," I thought, does she perhaps think that "mental stimulation" requires manipulatives?  When she said "no analogies they could make, no comparisons they could make with their prior knowledge," I was just plain confused, because that stuff is all over their discourse.  Perhaps she meant no teacher-provided analogies?  While I was struggling to understand what she might mean, and also struggling with my own emotional response, she went on.

C: I just didn't see any excitement.  I question the worksheet.  I question the assignment.  What is the validity, what is the learning goals that this instructor has for these students?  Because they didn't have any [one?] that I could see, except getting it done.  

Rachel:  Hm.  Did other people see that same lack, disconnect between what they were, the physics they were talking about and anything else that they might have related it to?  Seemed like you were talking about them struggling to make that relationship, but maybe not successfully, is what you're saying?

C: I would think that these students walk away from this thinking, "Bleh bleh [inaudible]."

[laughter]

someone: Physics is so

Rachel: Biology is so *whew*

[more laughter]

Rachel: I gotta close this up here, but this is actually a good note to end on, because [cut]

It was NOT a good note to end on - that was sheer sleight of hand on my part.  Nor do I have any idea what C said that we all laughed at; nothing was funny to me; the laughing, for me, was pure tension.  But whatever, we had to end class, so I diverted - I said something like, "It's worth pointing out that we don't have to agree on whether this is an exemplary episode in order to have a good discussion about the student thinking that is in it," and somehow got us out of there.

Even if there had been time, though, I could not have thought clearly enough to locate an appropriate response, if there even is one.  The students weren't doing shit, was what I heard, and it's the instructor's fault for putting them in a situation that ignores the most basic pedagogical requirements.  In other words, we can blame this pedagogical shambles on the instructional design's "validity" and the instructor's incompetence.  I was boiling sea of inappropriate responses combined with an intense urge to run out of the room.  In my favor, at least I knew I was flooded.  Although I thought of all kinds of things to say (for example, spitting back at them that this is MY worksheet and what did they think of THAT), I was pretty sure that whatever I said would be coming from a bad place, so I did my best to say basically nothing at all.  I pathetically packed up my free DVDs.

Later, when I had calmed down some, I tried to think over why the things these teachers said had gotten under my skin so much.  Part of it is surely that I am not so sure about my own legitimacy and competence as an AYPD instructor.  Another part of it, I think, is that they were dismissing an episode I love and find worthwhile.  I was saying, "Hey, look, see what I brought!" and they were saying, "That's garbage. You should know better."  And it's not just the episode I love, it's the students in that episode.  I love them!  I delight in their free-ranging conversation, the connections they make, their friendly skepticism.  And they were telling me that they are not delightful, not lovable.  Just in that offhand way like "You can't be cold, it's perfectly warm in here."  They can't do that to my students!  But they did, and seemed to think nothing of it, and I got confused and defensive and stuck.

Stamatis and I talked about it and agreed that this had been rough, but that it was much better that it was me rather than one of the teachers, and that it would provide a heck of a basis for us to establish the norms for future video discussions.  We agreed that the next AYPD session would make explicit use of what had happened.  You can imagine how much I was looking forward to that.  Not.

AYPD general plan, 2010-11

I had been thinking of this blog as mainly for thinking about the summer, but of course it ought to be about all of our work with the teachers -- all the more so since many of the researcher-videographers who are part of the project aren't here during the academic year.  And maybe you all out there could help!  So I am going to try to document and summarize what's been going on with the teachers in the evening academic-year professional development (AYPD) sessions.

The Energy Project team decided that as the summer focused on learning about energy, the AYPD should focus on learning to attend to student ideas.  Not too surprisingly, we decided that the most effective way to do this would be for the teachers to spend a good fraction of the AYPD sessions watching video of students discussing their ideas, especially ideas about energy, and ideally the participating teachers' own students - a video club.  Then, while I was out of the room, everyone else decided that I should be one of the primary instructors for the evening sessions, especially for the video club part.  (Stamatis is the other instructor.  Eleanor attends when she can.)  This is a big challenge for me, because while I'm pretty comfortable leading sessions in which other people (including teachers) discuss a video episode in detail, I've never led sessions in which teachers were looking at video of themselves.  That seems importantly different for at least three reasons that I can think of:

1. Putting your own classroom in front of colleagues for discussion is a big risk.  I don't feel like I have much experience in doing what it takes to insure a safe environment for everyone, so that we can do worthwhile work and not hurt anyone or just be unproductive.
2. This is work that engages the teachers as teachers, rather than as physics learners.  It's a little embarrassing for me to admit this, but I have almost no experience with that. 
3. The last time I did field work, the classroom video that I collected did not include much that would support attention to student ideas.  Student ideas weren't being made visible.  I'm worried I won't be able to find episodes worth discussing.

There are also some logistical difficulties that I think are going to make life harder:  Video clubs that I know of have been fairly intimate little learning teams, maybe 4-10 teachers, and we have 15-25 teachers at each session.  Worse, it's not the same people at every session, because the teachers don't have to attend all of them to earn credit.  It seems like it might be really hard to have an atmosphere of trust under these conditions.

That said, I can't think of anything that I think would be better to do with these sessions, and I can't think of anyone else who I think would be better at running them.  (Actually I very much can, but those people aren't here.)  So we're going for it.  Through Rosemary Russ I know that Miriam Sherin's group has a major focus on teacher learning with video:  I am learning as much as I can from what they do, and we are adopting their theoretical framework.  I also had a reassuring conversation with Emily van Zee when I was in Oregon over the weekend.  

Do you all know of more published work, or other people, that might help us in our planning?