Teaching Seminar: Leaves in the street episode

Instead of identifying the Teaching Seminars by number, I'm going to identify them by topic from now on.

In preparing for this session, I got really excited, because (drumroll please) we actually have video from one of our participants' classrooms in which students' ideas are highly visible!  This is pretty much a first for the project.  Wow!  It's Matt Jones's class, and it's great stuff.  (I'm having a technical problem posting the episode here - maybe later.)

Only six teachers showed up to the session, which is too bad, but oh well.  As far as how it went, I feel unsure about reporting on it, because I was really engrossed in it and I'm not sure how much of the discussion was them and how much was me.  I can say that I felt very comfortable and happy with the conversation:  it seemed like there was a lot of interest in the students' ideas about energy, and a pleasant willingness to talk about other features of the episode I thought were interesting (like how the group handles dissent).  Nobody dissed anybody.  Nobody said the students were not getting it, or were getting it, or were wasting their time, or needed the teacher.  One teacher (Cindy) started to say something that I thought was going to be a judgment of the lesson, and I stopped her, and in response she said, "Actually I think the lesson is brilliant!" which ... is also a judgment; but it didn't seem like too big of a deal.  By the end of the class, it seemed reasonable to do something I think of as fairly advanced, which was to identify the features of the conversation that make us feel that, as teachers, we are getting a lot of good information about student thinking. Here is what we came up with:

Again, I feel hesitant saying that this is super fantastic because I think a lot of it might have been me.  But maybe it's significant that they and I were well-aligned enough that the exercise was acceptable to everyone in the room.  

Because I liked them, I am also posting the discussion questions that I came up with in advance.  In the moment, I decided not to hand these out, but rather to just use them as prompts for myself. I think we covered a lot of this territory in the two hours. 

Do leaves in the street have energy?

Episode 1 – Students talk amongst themselves

1.     What do you infer S2 means by “perpetual motion”?

2.     What do you think of S5’s argument responding to the perpetual motion statement?  Is it convincing to you?  Does it seem to affect S2?

3.     S2 differentiates a leaf from a bus (and bicycle) by saying you don’t “use” a leaf; it doesn’t “do much”; it kind of just “sits there until someone moves it.”  Summarize the distinction you think she is making.

4.     S2 very dramatically draws out the vowels of “use,” “do,” and “sit.”  How would the meaning of what she says be different if she did not do that?

5.     The students propose various things about energy and wind:  that wind has energy, that wind can create energy, that wind can be a source of energy, and that wind is like a foot on pedals (presumably of a bicycle).  Draw a diagram for each of these that illustrates how they are different.

6.     When S2 says the leaves wouldn’t move without the wind, S5 says that a bus wouldn’t move without gasoline, either.  She seems to be arguing that as regards energy, a bus and a leaf are not fundamentally different kinds of things.  What point specifically do you think she is trying to make about the role of energy in each case?

7.     S4 complains that they didn’t listen to her.  What did she say that they disregarded?  What was she trying to get them to do that they did not do?

8.     Other times, it seems that the students are definitely listening to each other.  One kind of evidence is that they look at each other while they talk, but as we all know, it’s possible to appear attentive while actually thinking about something else.  Find moments where there is strong evidence that one student has really listened to another one.  The evidence might be in what they say or in how they say it.

9.     There are moments of dissent in this episode.  Dissent is a big deal because it’s intellectually and emotionally risky – a “hot spot” for learning.  How does this group handle dissent? Are the students interacting with one another in a way that is respectful and inviting?  How or how not?

10.  Dissent also can be very informative for us as observers, because it places two ideas in contrast, potentially clarifying both.  What is clarified in each moment of dissent that you find, if anything? 

11.  It seems like we have the opportunity to learn a lot from this episode about what underlies the short answers students write in their notebooks.  We don’t have evidence for why they have such an interesting conversation.  We can, however, discuss what is happening:  What are the features of the conversation that make us feel that, as teachers, we are getting a lot of good information about student thinking?  (For example, we can tell that they are listening to each other (above), and they challenge each other (where?).  What else?)

12.  What evidence is there in this episode that this kind of discussion is a good use of the students’ time?  Do you think they think it is a good use of their time?

Teaching seminar, seventh session - observations we made

Sam also blogged about this session.  I wanted to add some of the specific observations we made of the video we watched.

As Sam said, the students are not very enlightening with their discussion as they are creating the white board.  A lot of what they do is just say things, and write them down or not; there's not much in the way of discussion or debate.  A big idea that I prompted is that from watching the video you learn that what makes it onto the white board is not representative of "the students' ideas" in any simple way.  For example the guy in the grey shirt, who we call Boy 1 (B1), says energy is "fuel" and "nutrients," but that doesn't make it onto the board.  It seems like his seatmate, Girl 1 (in the green sweatshirt), takes charge of managing the space on the board -- she divides it into sections, she tells other people what to draw, and she even erases something elaborate that B1 had drawn.  Later the other girl (G2, in black and white) is busy drawing stuff by herself while G1 isn't really looking.  So what we as teachers see, looking at the final product, has a lot to do with the social dynamics of the group, not only their ideas about energy in any pure way.

Margaret asked why the teacher had such a strong priority that people should draw pictures, not write words.  She was extremely gracious about this.  What I saw in the video is that Chris is shouting over and over, "Draw pictures!  More pictures, less words!" so forcefully that I could hardly think.  Lisa suggested that it was maybe easier for the students to just regurgitate words, but with pictures kids tend to be more original, so maybe the teacher was pushing for that.  I've asked Chris what her reasons were.  (She wasn't there for the discussion.)

One story from the video, starting at about 5:20 in the captioned movie:  B1 says, "I want to draw something!  I feel excluded!" in a fake-whining kind of way -- we observed that he is pretty jocular most of the time.  G1 tells him to what to draw and where to draw it (she wants him to draw a light bulb under the word "look," to show what energy looks like).  He is quiet for a second, his face relaxes, he reaches back to touch his own neck, and he says, "No, shouldn't we put like a little --" and makes a gesture in the air.  The thing that struck me is that I felt like it's the only time in the whole 12 minutes where I heard his normal voice, instead of a singsong jokey voice.  I was also struck because I think this is the only moment of dissent in the episode -- the only time when someone says something and someone else says, "No, I don't think so, I think it should be this instead."  Those moments always seem really key to me for finding out what people think.  Unfortunately this little moment doesn't last long; G1 tells him to draw what she said, he creates some rather elaborate thing while she is talking to other people, and then when she looks back at him, she says, "What is that?" pretty confrontationally.  He says he was having a "creative fart" (?) and starts to change one part of his picture, and then she just erases the whole thing.  It seems pretty harsh.  Right after that, they're talking about how energy would feel, and he offers to go outside and cut a wire and electrocute himself and tell them how it feels.  "It feels... not... so... good," he says, and pretends to die in his chair.  The symbolism of the whole thing broke my heart!  One moment of genuineness from him, and they wipe out his contribution so definitively that he offers to go out in the street and off himself!  Then, to add insult to injury (or maybe drive the nail in the coffin...), when it was time to present, the other three kids used up all the material on the board and he was stuck very awkwardly without anything to say.  It was painful... they had wiped out his big contribution (both physically and emotionally), and now he was on the spot.  But then when he did say something, he said something really cool about energy being "how the world works." And it seemed like the whole thing was kind of coming full circle, because he had initiated the conversation with "fuel" and "nutrients," which was also very cool even though it didn't get onto the board.

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.

Proximal formative assessment

I am very taken with this chapter by Erickson on formative assessment.  The focus is on "proximal" formative assessment, which is the moment-to-moment stuff - most of what concerns us in video analysis.  Thanks, Kara:

Erickson, F. (2007), chapter 8 Some Thoughts on “Proximal” Formative Assessment of Student Learning. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 106: 186–216.  Link