Teaching Seminar: Which student do you like the most?

Aargh, more technical difficulties! I didn't realize how low the batteries on the mics were and couldn't find more, and they all died, receivers and transmitters. Hopefully the receivers died first and the camera switched to its internal microphone. At least I took really detailed notes (4 pages of them)!

Stamatis led the class tonight, and it was a very different kind of class than usual. I was not involved in the planning and didn't know what he was going to do ahead of time, so the class unfolded a bit like a mystery novel for me.

He started with a demo in which he put a tube of liquid nitrogen into water and it started spinning, and then asked people to figure out what was happening with the energy in this situation. After some discussion, he reminded them of the discussion of "features" of energy and asked what kind of questions, in terms of what features, they asked themselves when trying to figure out what what was going on. He said they were trying to think of a name for this type of question and needed help. I'm not sure I quite understood what this was about.

Then we switched to watching a video from the Hammer and Van Zee book of students discussing what would happen if you cut the string on the pendulum at its highest point. He prefaced the video with "Tonight we’re going to go to a different kind of video. We’re not going to be thinking so much about student ideas, but about the students themselves as human beings." Several people laughed at this comment, and I'm not sure why. Then he hit play and we watched for 10 minutes. After the video, he said, "The question I’m dying to ask is: “Which student do you like the most and why?" People really didn't want to answer the question. One group said they couldn't answer it because they hadn't been watching with that question in mind, they'd been paying attention to classroom culture. So Stamatis showed the video again so they could watch with that question in mind. And they still refused to answer the question. Stamatis kept pushing them and eventually one person volunteered their favorite and then a few more people. The point of all this, according to Stamatis, was to look at what values were inherent in their choices. Then someone said she thought about it in terms of who she calls on in class and this launched everybody into a long discussion about who we call on in class and why. And then everybody started talking about what they liked about the classroom in the video. This discussion was relevant to the topic of what values inform our teaching, but it seemed like it undid months of training to focus on student ideas and not evaluate the lesson. Or maybe it just cut through the very thin veneer of restraint they acquired over the last few months.

Then Stamatis showed them the "Initial findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project" and they discussed how it's important to think about your own values in teaching and the values of administrators making decisions about education.

Stamatis ended by asking them whether they wanted to watch more video of each others' classrooms, as a segue into trying to convince them to sign up to be videotaped because we need volunteers. I did know this part was coming, and was disappointed in the response. Nobody jumped up to say that watching video had been really valuable for them. A couple people said, "Or? What's the alternative?" which I guess could be interpreted as, "Of course we're going to do that, why wouldn't we?" or it could be interpreted as, "Can we do something else please?" Lisa 2 said "I want to see more video of people I don’t know, but I don’t want the discomfort of seeing people I know." Margaret said after watching the video from Matt's class she had gone home and asked her students the same questions and was really excited to see that they responded in the same way as Matt's students. She said she'd love to do activities where they all ask their students the same questions and then come back and talk about them. This sounds to me like what teachers proposed in the AYPD last year, but never really did. Then Nina said, "I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get to see my video, and I’d love to see other people’s." That was the most positive response we got about the video.

What to do if the mic is giving a lot of static

At the last teaching seminar, I encountered this problem where I turned on the mic and listened in on the headphones and there was a ton of static. It happened on two different cameras, but it turned out that the culprit was not the mic, but the camera, which had gotten onto some weird setting. No idea how it happened, but in case it ever happens again, here's how to fix it:

Press the "FUNC." button.
Use the arrows on the "SET" button to scroll down to "menu" and then press "SET" to select it.
Scroll down to "SYSTEM SETUP", then use the right arrow to get into that menu
Select "AV/PHONES" and then push "SET"
Switch from "AV" to "PHONES"

Teaching Seminar: Continuation of Leaves in the Street episode

I'm finally getting around to blogging about the Teaching Seminar from 2/7, where the teachers discussed another 12 minutes of Matt's class. I had some technical difficulties, so there was a good chunk of time I wasn't able to listen, and then then battery on the mic died at some point, so I don't know how much of the discussion we actually have audio for. Too bad, because it may have been an interesting discussion. Also, I was so excited about the video myself (I had not seen it before class) that I had a hard time going meta and analyzing their discussion of it.

What excited me about the video: Lots of language about energy that I didn't understand. Using strange grammar and making strange distinctions like "It has a source of energy" and "Does it have energy or does it just use energy?" I suspect that the students are implicitly using some other metaphor for energy, but I'm not sure what it is.

Also, one thing that came up the next week in our research group meeting when we discussed the video: There's a point when Matt says, "So it's not necessarily that an object that is moving has energy, it just takes energy to cause something to move?" He's listening to what the students are saying and he's noticing a distinction that most experts wouldn't even see, because to an expert, those things are the same. Someone argued that he's been primed to hear that distinction because he's been in our summer courses and teaching seminars for two years, where we've talked in great detail about these distinctions. But if that's true, is this a piece of evidence that our course is actually having an impact on a teacher's classroom practice? Or maybe Matt would have done this even if he'd never been part of this course.

What may be interesting about the teaching seminar: Lots of rich discussion about what students were thinking. I caught teachers saying a lot of things that seemed too simplistic to me, like they weren't really getting what students were thinking, but at the same time, they were really talking the whole time about what students might be thinking. If we want to write a paper about how teachers' attention to student thinking changes over the course of the teaching seminar, there's probably some good data here, but I'd have to watch it again to know what to pick out.