Benedikt watched the first fifteen minutes of video of one of Chris Blea's classes today, and saw.... everything and nothing, in a way I will try to articulate. First of all, technically it was fine, which was good to know, and skimming through the video it very much appears to be a high-discourse classroom, so there is a good hope of actually getting to see students discussing their ideas together during this session. If that is the case, it'll be a first for this project, and a big score.
In the fifteen minutes that we watched at normal speed (neither skimming nor analyzing), the students talk about the camera. A lot. "The camera! The camera! We're on TV! Remember that permission slip we signed, that's for the class that she is taking! I want to be on TV!" They look up at the camera, they do little dance moves, etc. Chris starts class by saying, "Today we are going to finish up this activity. We are going to do part 2. Homework is your conclusion paragraph. Reread part 2 of the lab to begin." It's all procedural; I don't remember her even saying anything about what topic it is. They open their lab books, but the ones on camera don't really read. More camera antics (but quieter ones). Chris, for the next several minutes, keeps up a fairly continual patter of, "So guys, right now you are reading the lab. You are rereading the lab. You are trying to figure out what we're doing. You are not talking." Myself, I would find it hard to read with her talking, but I don't know what it takes to hold together a room of 6th graders so I am not one to judge.
The fact that they attend to the camera for so very long is a drag on the one hand, because I'm sorry to have disrupted Chris's class. On the other hand, though, camera effects are something about which I have a theoretical perspective. My perspective (and I think I have references for this? better check) is that people stop attending to the camera when they have something more interesting to do. Conversely, if they keep attending to the camera, they don't have anything more interesting to do. Thus, the activity Chris is trying to start is not interesting to them. Chris's reiterating "You are reading the lab, you are not talking," seems to me to be additional evidence for this; they must be pretty easily diverted from the desired activity, or she wouldn't have to harp at them constantly to keep doing it.
Benedikt, Hunter, and I tried to put our finger on what the problem is with the activity that Chris is presenting, such that the students are almost aggressively not interested. We thought of a lot of things that we're not sure answer the question, such as: The instructions are all procedural, "read this page"; there is little sense of purpose. The activity is presented as very literal, with no invitation to use your imagination. The instructor is talking kind of like a robot rather than showing personal enthusiasm for the topic.
Trying to bring (my understanding of) a Rogerian perspective to the analysis, I remembered that one of the key relational issues is: As human beings we seem to need to know where the other person is coming from. We (clients, students) need people in helping relationships (therapists, teachers) to be genuine and transparent, or we get anxious. If we don't know who we are talking to, we don't want to reveal ourselves. We'd rather leave, actually, or if we can't leave, we opt out in some other way. So is Chris not being "genuine"? After some discussion we decided that Chris is not really being Chris, here, not being her unique Chris self; instead, she is being a local representative of some remote authoritarian voice. "Now You Will Read." It may as well be over the public address system. The person in the room (Chris) is not the entity that is addressing us. That entity is remote and invisible, and actually so is Chris. So, in a Rogerian sense, no wonder the students are opting out. The whole thing is very dislocated.
To regain the students' attention, in this perspective, one would need to be present in the room, as oneself. And one would need to address the students out of that presence, and also be addressing the students as unique people who are in the room with you, rather than as representatives of Studenthood. There would need to be what I'm going to call a relational discourse, where the relation is between the unique teacher-person and the unique student-person, in that present moment. I realize I sound very new agey. I think I am stuck with it.
The idea of "relational discourse" seems to me to be totally critical to formative assessment, especially the kind of moment-to-moment formative assessment that I'm looking for (but rarely finding) in short bursts of video. The only way you're going to get information about the students you're interacting with is if they are willing to share themselves with you. If we are with Rogers, then they are going to share with you best when you are at your most genuine and transparent, when you yourself are most immediately present with them. Then on top of that you need to have the other things that Rogers cites as key to a helping relationship: warmth (unconditional positive regard) and empathy (seeing things through their eyes).
The usual definition of FA is something like "using evidence about students' understanding to make informed decisions about the next step or steps in instruction." Using that definition to spot FA, you have to do this multistep analysis: Did the teacher elicit student ideas? Was the teacher informed by hearing the student ideas? Did the teacher put those student ideas to use in an instructional decision? It feels very intellectualized. Relational discourse, on the other hand, feels like the sort of thing that we as human beings are very attuned to, and that makes it potentially a very useful concept. If I can hook my FA-episode-selection-process to something I'm humanly attuned to, I'm going to be better at spotting relevant episodes.
(I think attunement in general is extremely important for qualitative analysis in general, because there is just so much data and it's so overwhelmingly rich, you need the help of your instincts to spot the good stuff. We should take every opportunity to harness our selective attention to our holistic sense of what's what.)
Hi Rachel. I dig it.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of a colleague who said "I've been teaching for 30 years. I don't need to elicit their ideas- I know what kinds of ideas freshmen have...". That is, there is no unique-student-person in this classroom anymore. And yet I also totally know how he feels! - Sometimes watching a group of freshmen reason through evaporative cooling is so godawfully similar to last semester's freshmen reasoning through evaporative cooling that it's pretty hard to see them as unique-student-people!
And this: "The only way you're going to get information about the students you're interacting with is if they are willing to share themselves with you." -- makes me think of Randi Engle's work (a conference poster?) on expansive framing in science. That is, there's not only relational merit to this sharing but there's real scientific merit (*beyond* the relationship stuff) to getting this right.
In other news, I gave our dep't seminar today on inside-out v. outside-in instruction and they seemed to like it -- or at least they humor me!
So much of what we do in teaching, even in PER, is not relational discourse, and yet, it works to some extent. What popped into my head when I read this post was Michael Wittmann talking about Jeff Morgan doing research interviews: he is completely stone-faced and monotone; Jeff as a human being is not present at all. And yet he was able to get enough data out of those interviews to write a very good PER thesis. So what's up with that? Is it just limited, and we would be able to get so much more rich data/learning if we could interact with our students in a Rogerian way?
ReplyDeleteIn response to Leslie's comment about how we already know what freshmen think about physics, surely good teaching requires knowing more than what they think: we also need to know how they are feeling about it, if they are resisting it, if they are excited about it, if they are bored with it, etc., and address that as well. Perhaps a good teacher would already know how freshmen feel about physics too. But it seems like this phenomena of already knowing what they think is an artifact of teaching them a narrowly pre-defined curriculum. Surely if you taught your student-guided scientific inquiry class for 30 years, you would continue to learn new things from your students and it would be much easier to see them as unique-student-people than if you taught a standard freshman physics course for 30 years.
I haven't had a chance to post on this thread, thought it's been fascinating to me, mostly because I haven't quite known what to say. But, with Sam mentioning my student, Jeff Morgan, I wanted to raise a point of orders.
ReplyDeleteIt's possible to describe Jeff's behavior in interviews as stonyfaced, but a more appropriate description is that it was absolutely consistent with his personality - a quiet, contemplative guy who gives others the space to talk while he listens. He talks not in a monotone, but (to use a stretotype) as a midwesterner. (Smirk.) He used to be like this in group meeting, too. He'd quietly listen to all of us, never interrupting, always paying attention, and then he'd kind of summarize everyone's point and suggest the consensus solution. It was a calm leadership, and it worked fabulously.
What I'm saying is that Jeff as a human being absolutely was visible in his interviews. Did he use that subtle grin of his? Well, yes. Did he guffaw, like he does in real life? No, but I suggest that's more because of what an interview is than the person who is there. Maybe that's your point - that interviews themselves don't allow for certain kinds of human interactions. I can totally agree with that.
With that, I'll end my (loving) defense of Jeff Morgan and fade into the background again.
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification. I should be more careful about summarizing conversations I barely remember from several years ago!
Sam