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.
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