Episode title (on server): UE2 120626 1542 T2 Misconceptions talk
(Loose) transcript:
[00:00:00.00] Michelle: Wendy?
Wendy: Mmhmm?
Michelle: Um, that My Private Universe, is that the video they made where I think it was these kids graduating from like Harvard?
[00:00:12.22] Wendy: MIT.
Michelle: Oh, was it MIT?
Wendy: Mmhm.
[00:00:13.15] Michelle: And they have these WILD misconceptions?
Wendy: Mmhm.
Michelle: Okay, I have seen that.
[00:00:18.04] Wendy: And I can't remember where it was, it might have been here, that the word. It was probably here. The word misconception.
Michelle: Mmhm.
[00:00:31.00] Wendy: It tends to be a negative term. Saying that what you believe is wrong. And you shouldn't use that, in a sense, because what you believe is what you believe based on your experiences and your knowledge and your understanding. So it's not necessarily wrong, it...
Michelle: It's yours.
[00:00:48.19] Wendy: Yeah, we need to mature it, we need to build upon it, we need to tweak it. And so I always, now when I hear the word or think of the word or use the word, I'm really careful about how. Because that really hit home with me, as far as, you know, what I believe is what I believe...
[00:01:06.03] Wendy:...because of who I am and what I've experienced. You know what I mean? So when we were answering those questions on that survey, um, and we were answering one on do scientific theories change or are they build on cultural, I think it was the one on are they built on social and cultural things...
[00:01:24.20] Wendy:...you know, my husband was saying one thing, and I was saying, you know, well, what about those people in Nambia who can only understand why the earth, why the sun comes up and goes down based on their experiences.
[00:01:37.14] Wendy: They don't have the technology. Their experience is that the sun rises and the sun sets, and there's probably a cultural reason as to why.
Commentary: Eleanor has just given Michelle (closest to camera), Barb (in the middle), and Wendy (closest to the window) the 'forms' table from last year to revisit. A few minutes earlier, Eleanor gave the class her 'answer' to the mousetrap car question that the participants completed on their own and then discussed, and they all expressed their relief that Eleanor was "giving them answers." Michelle, et al., said they had "worked hard" for it, and Sherry (at a different table) said how much more she learned by thinking about the question first; because of this, Eleanor's answer made a lot more sense. Wendy brought up the Private Universe videos -- particularly the piece where a young girl is interviewed before and after a lesson on planetary orbits, and she "holds on" to her ideas, even though the teacher explicitly addressed them. Then the episode starts.
This moment stuck out to me because I care a lot about teachers valuing student ideas, and I tend to think that instruction whose primary goal is to 'fix' the stuff that's 'wrong' with student ideas often devalues the ideas that students bring with them. (Disclaimer: I don't think this is always true, I think it's often or maybe even only sometimes true.) So I appreciated Wendy's picking up on Michelle's use of the word misconceptions and sharing her attention to her own use of it.
I'm still trying to figure out if she's really valuing student ideas or just changing her language. She's still very concerned about changing their ideas, or at least moving them forward. But she's also acknowledging that those ideas come from somewhere, that they're based on real experiences. Still processing.
Wow. This is a really compelling discussion. I'm impressed with these teachers' level of constructivist epistemology. It's by no means thought through. Still, when When Wendy says "we need to build on it," I am reminded of a quote from David Hammer: "if students construct new understandings out of their current knowledge, then there must be aspects of their current knowledge that are useful for that construction" (Hammer, "More on Misconceptions," 1996, p.1319).
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of physics research I did a couple years ago that was also videotaped involving physics undergraduate majors from previous general physics courses with researcher being their instructor. They took pre and post tests and talked their answers through while researcher asked open-ended inquiry questions. I processed the data and concluded that many relied on real-life prior knowledge reasoning whether than examples from class which were elaborate. They held onto their "misconceptions" though they were taught or discovered another truth, the real truth. I like how Wendy changed how she thinks of the word since it was something negative and feel she has to build upon it to make it more valuable and in turn, true eventually. I am very interested in dispelling many misconceptions as an instructor, future author, mother and human. We do hold misconceptions dear because we learned them as we grew so the misconceptions became part of our file system and must be filed correctly which is harder to do the older we get.
ReplyDeleteMichele, it's really interesting to me that you use a "filing system" as an illustration of your view of how people think, because that's exactly how I describe this way of thinking to others. Brandon refers above to another (what feels to me very different) view on how people think, which is not at all like a filing system. If you're interested in learning more about some of the big voices in the misconceptions-resources conversation, I'd be happy to point you in the direction of a paper or two. Thanks for sharing!
DeleteAn alternative to this 'misconceptions' approach is to consider *resources* that students possess (I've been at Maryland long enough to feel like I must insert this comment when I see the word 'misconceptions')! The idea is that students bring to bear different resources in different places, and the instructor's role in some sense involves trying to activate the right resources at the appropriate times. There was an instance of that this morning in UE1, where Valerie commented to a table-mate that Lezlie had given her just the right question that activated just the right train of thought at just the right moment, and that she felt that this was the essence of good teaching. All of that said, I'm of the view that living entirely in one camp (misconceptions or resources) is probably problematic. Some incorrect beliefs are in fact pretty stable and widespread, and to call them misconceptions seems like it could be productive in certain cases, if nothing else as a way of pointing out common threads of student difficulty.
ReplyDeleteAnd...I'm going down the list. :) Ben beat me to it, apparently, and I didn't see it. Sorry, Ben!
DeleteOne benefit of the resourse approach over a misconception approach is that it can accommodate the highly contextually sensitive nature of student responses.
ReplyDeleteMichael Wittmann is doing some interesting work right now looking at how altering the phrasing of FCI questions can completely alter the content response of students.
Y'all know me well enough to know that I am strongly on one side of the misconceptions-resources divide. When talking to teachers, though, I try to keep in mind that when a teacher to shows concern with misconceptions, she is at least thinking in terms of attending to student ideas, even if for bummer reasons. I think the best thing I can to do to expand peoples' sense of learners' expertise is to show video of learners being brilliant. I don't want to be telling the teachers they have a misconception about misconceptions!
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree with Rachel on this. Teaching requires a certain sensitivity to the cognitive state that the students have when they enter the class. Misconceptions do allow for this consideration of the part of teachers.
ReplyDeleteRachel, I'm amused that you made the "misconceptions about misconceptions" joke, as I had made a similar one offline. But it gets at an interesting point: we clearly all value a teacher's ability to attend to the students' ideas, indeed this seems to be a component of both sides of the misconceptions/resources divide. How productive would it be, I wonder, to consider this sensitivity as a productive pedagogical resource?
Sam, for example, mentioned (in another post) different levels of attention that a teacher might pay to students ideas, including misconceptions, unproductive resources, productive resources, and general resources. Peerhaps this could be viewed as different levels of activation of this resource?
Of course this is all just theoretical speculation. What really matters is whether looking at pedagogy from a resources standpoint would hold any pragmatic value. I don't know.