What happens when you give teachers the right answer?

Something that struck me when writing this post about understanding models earlier today was this episode, embedded in the ninth bullet point.  (See the original post for context.)

Episode title is 'UE2 120627 1056 T2 if only we hadn't gotten the answer.'

Episode transcript below:
 [00:00:00.00] Sherry: I think that what happened to me was I...I said something that replicates the real thing because you can't see and use the real thing, the actual.  And after going through I marked very few and I...model includes diagrams and computer and...
Eleanor: So you were thinking physical model...

[00:00:32.12] Sherry: I was.
Eleanor: Like a paper airplane or a balloon or the cell thing.
Sherry: Right because when I teach my kids, I say, this is just the model of the...
Eleanor: ?

[00:00:41.16] Sherry: Right, because we can't get out in space and see it really, so it's a model.  And that's my narrow focus of a model, and so whether we checked it off to begin or we knew it all at the beginning, it doesn't matter, it's what we learned.

[00:00:54.06] Eleanor: Right, yeah.
Jeff: Right, no, I totally agree with that.  I was just frustrated with the semantics, and maybe that's part of the process.
Eleanor: I think...

[00:01:06.07] Jeff: I mean, what you're saying and the way you're, is exactly the way I think the probe should work.  But if we're interpreting it based on how we read the sentence, I don't know if it necessarily.
Eleanor: It depends on if we think the goal is to get the answers the Paige Keeley thinks we should get or if the goal is to have a conversation about what a model is.

[00:01:29.04] Jeff: I guess you get there either way, so.
Eleanor: Yeah, for the most part, I see these probes, and this is just an example because I wanted us to have a conversation about modeling but also to look at research (?), but I see them mostly as conversation starters.  So I don't see them as, I wouldn't use it as a post-test, because I don't see the way she phrases the questions as meant for that, and I think there is some ambiguity in the way it's phrased.  And so that can be fun to talk about, or if it's frustrating to talk about, let's talk about something else.

[00:01:57.14] Eleanor: But I don't want to see them as things where we have to really figure out what the question is asking so we can make sure we get it right.  I see them as, oh, you saw the question this way, I saw it this way.  Well, how does that change how I might answer it?  You know, and the goal is really to have a conversation about what a model is in a way that will help us think about energy, because that's what we're thinking about.

[00:02:25.13] Jeff: But we want to value the process.  However, the first thing we did at our table was move to the next page and see which ones were right.  (Laughter)
Eleanor: Yes, and that's because we didn't get to this till the very end of the day.  Usually we would have a conversation about it and then I would hand you the packet.  But we didn't have time.  I mean, you had like seven minutes.

[00:02:43.25] Eleanor: So yes, I do realize that that does short-circuit the process.  Sorry.
Jeff: No, that's fine, it's just.
Eleanor: Maybe I shouldn't have given it to you, I should have kept it for today.

[00:02:52.01] Wendy: I would have been curious to see what kind of conversation we would have had...
Eleanor: Yeah, without the packet.
Wendy:...otherwise, but knowing the answers, I kind of went, now wait a minute, this is what she said?
Eleanor: Where you could still argue with her even knowing what she said.

[00:02:59.00] Wendy: Right, cause I went through and marked them and went, now wait a minute, she says this?

Commentary
What struck me is that Wendy says "I would have been curious to see what kind of conversation we would have had [without the packet]."  I was surprised to hear this, because Wendy was a part of the group that continually referenced Eleanor's "responsibility" to provide them answers the day before, and here she was saying she wished (?) Eleanor wouldn't have given them answers so quickly.

It made me curious to go back and look at the way that teachers respond to and reflect on "getting answers."  I can think of at least three different ways that I've seen this unfold:

• Teachers get an answer and then have a multitude of new questions to ask.  And they acknowledge this out loud -- that getting the answer made them even more curious.  Rachel wrote about this last year in this post, and I referenced something Sherry said in a post I made yesterday.
  
• Teachers demand an answer and then seem to get bored when the instructor offers one.  I wrote a long post about a lecture that Hunter gave about elevators in UE2 on my blog (which few have access to, since it's private).  The short version is that the teachers called on him to give them his answer -- to offer them "closure" on the elevator scenario -- and then they got "full" by the end of it.  My hypothesis is that they expected a simple, one-sentence answer, whereas Hunter gave them a 30-minute answer. 
  
  I think this might also have happened at Wendy's table the day before the episode in this post (on 6/26), when Michelle, Barb, and Wendy worked for what felt like three minutes on the mousetrap car question and then were distracted by other, non-mousetrap-car matters (like what was going on later that afternoon).  When Eleanor shared her answer to the question, they said, "We worked hard for that!"  I was surprised, because it didn't seem like they had worked very hard to me, but maybe this was another case of their expectations being that the answer was simple, and they had constructed way more than one sentence about it.
  
• Teachers get an answer and then wish they had spent more time thinking beforehand.  This is what seemed to happen in the episode above, and my hypothesis is that they got someone else's answer before they had solidified their own, and this confused them.

I would love to make this a research project (among many).  I think it would be fascinating to clip even more episodes (to try to figure out if there are more ways that teachers respond), watch what happens when teachers get answers and what they say happened for them, and figure out why (in multiple senses of the word "why").