Teaching seminar: Ball bounce episode

In Teaching Seminar on Tuesday night we had three items on the agenda:

1. Quickly share specific student ideas they had seen in their teaching and recorded in their little notebooks (during "dinner," ending at 6pm)
2. Collaboratively view what I'm calling the "Ball Bounce" episode, from Patti Banashak's class (6-7pm)
3. Work on the discourse tools we are helping them develop for use in their own classrooms (7-8pm)

Lane led the sharing from the little books and I liked the way it went very much. They had maybe three minutes to discuss at their table and then Lane called for one example from each table. Each person who spoke gave a specific, snappy contribution. Unfortunately I don't remember what anyone said! Does anyone else recall?

Also, I'm afraid that after leading the video part of the evening, I took a break while Lane led the discourse tools part. I'd be grateful if someone else could summarize that part of the class.

I led the video portion of the evening. I began by asking Patti to share what it was like to have us come and videotape her class. She was very much at ease and enthusiastic about it; she said it was almost completely hassle-free, that we just slipped in between classes and set stuff up without anyone hardly noticing, that there was no disturbance to her instruction. She said the consent forms were a bit of a bother but she understands why they're needed and that can't be helped. She encouraged everyone to invite us to visit. Isn't that nice?!

Then I had people propose norms for the discussion. I asked them to imagine that it was their classroom that was about to be shown, and think of how they would want people to talk about what they saw. People had good suggestions, along the lines of not critiquing the lesson, but rather just saying what we see the students doing. I added that we will really not have any basis for critiquing anyone's lesson, anyway, as we will only see a very short video episode.

In the episode we viewed, middle school students are attempting Energy Theater for a ball that bounces on the ground. Their scene begins just before the ball touches the ground and ends just as it leaves the ground. They have set out three loops of rope representing (from left to right, or foreground to background) the air, the ball, and the ground. They begin by deciding that they don’t need the air.

Here is a diagram Abby generated showing the layout of kids in the room:

The discussion of the video was great! People stuck to the norms very well and had interesting things to say. Here is the list of observations and questions that I generated from what they said. (I need to learn to write in narrower columns so that I can take a better photo.) After generating these questions, we watched the video again, with each table focusing on a single question (those are the numbers on the left). Some tables were able to answer their question definitively (3). Others determined that there was not evidence enough to answer their question (2, 6).

And, for future reference, here are the discussion questions that I prepared for myself in advance, then forgot to bring to the session. Some of them are similar to things that made it onto the board, i.e., the teachers noticed some of the same things I did. Nice! I do wish we had discussed the last one, but never mind.

• Make a visual representation of some kind showing the energy transfers and transformations that the students act out. (Draw a box for the ball and a box for the ground, and show what forms of energy they show as being where, throughout the process that they model.)
• What is signified by the rapid transitions between E and K?
• What is the significance of the placement of particular students within the object-areas? For example, Madelyn says, “So we should stand in the middle?” and Greg says, “No, we stand here at the bottom.” What difference does it make?
• One student says she feels like she is getting a “dance lesson.” What parts of what the students are doing seem to you to be about learning to do certain things with your body, and what are about showing what’s going on with the physics?
• Greg says, “We have to do it at the same time. He turns into heat, and the energy gets transferred into the ground.” What does he mean by that?
• Greg says, “We’re the ones pushing off the ground, and you’re the ones stretching.” What are the “ones” – units of energy? Bits of the ball?

In my opinion, an important area for growth in their video-discussion skills is for them to link their observation more closely to what they actually saw. For example, Ingrid's observation was, "Their analysis is very detailed." When I asked her to elaborate, she did not have much more at hand than that statement. It turned out that she was referring to the fact that the students divided the ball into parts and had different energy dynamics in the different parts -- a terrific point, but it took some effort to get there. Another area for growth is reducing the number of bland compliments. Laura in particular tended to say things like, "Seems like they're doing really great." Though this seems innocuous and pleasant, it actually gets under my skin, because it makes it seem like the point is to say whether the students are good or bad.

At the end of this part of the session I asked Patti how it felt to have her classroom observed in this way. She said it was fun and interesting and that everyone should do it! In particular, I remember her saying that when she watched the video, it was like seeing the scene for the first time, even though she had been there. Her memory of the events was blurrier than she had realized. People's observations were very interesting for her to hear, and she enjoyed the chance to reflect more deeply on what had been happening.