I Can't Imagine

There is a group of teachers in my building who are doing some professional development about discussion-based learning, and as part of the preparation for a day that we will be spending with one another next month we are doing some peer observations.  This week, one of the other teachers came in to watch one of my classes, and while she was in my classroom she asked the kids some questions, wanting their perspective on Harkness so she could share their feelings with the group.  While the other teacher didn’t share all of the responses with me, she did share one, and it absolutely made my day.  The question she put to the student was simple enough: “How do you feel about learning this way?”  The response from the student?  “At first, I wasn’t sure if I liked the class being run this way or not.  But now, I can’t imagine learning math any other way.”

I love this answer as it sits, but it got me thinking.  It’s now been a year and a half since I’ve lectured on any kind of a regular basis, and I’ve reached a point where I can’t imagine teaching any other way than I am now.  Whether it’s in my high school classroom where as close to Harkness as I can get rules the day, or my evening college classes where I run things on more of a flipped model, I can’t imagine running things any way other than through discussions.  The assessment information I get from the discussions, the rapport I am able to build with the students, the general atmosphere of the room…all of this has improved since I started running my classroom through discussions.  Not that it was bad before – it wasn’t - but the improvement from my perspective as a teacher has been priceless.  I get constant feedback, the students have a real sense that we are in this together, and the room is relatively relaxed.  OK, there’s some frustration when a student isn’t understanding a concept, both for the student and for me, but it’s productive frustration and certainly better than before when there were many times that students didn’t ask questions until right before the test when the urgency of the situation made the frustration far more intense.  The discussion-based classroom alleviates a lot of this type of frustration by all but forcing the kids to speak up and ask their questions, as well as forcing the teacher to pay more attention to the individuals than to the class as a whole.

Nope, I can’t imagine teaching math any other way, and for at least one of the students, they can’t imagine learning math any other way.  I doubt the student is alone in feeling this way, and after gathering next month, I hope that I’m not alone, either.

Why I Made the Switch

A few of the other teachers in my building have begun to implement some discussion-based teaching in their classrooms a couple days each week.  During a conversation this week, one of these other teachers made the observation that teaching this way is exhausting.  This came as no surprise to me, but it often comes as a surprise to many to whom I try to explain the way things are run in my classroom.  My assumption is that they imagine me just sort of sitting around watching the kids work.  Or worse, that I sit at my desk while the kids flounder, and every once in a while I descend from the heights to make sure the kids are still working.  Of course, the reality is that if you're running a discussion-based classroom "correctly", you're constantly walking around the room, constantly listening to the conversations, constantly assessing how well the kids are understanding the material, and so on.  The walking is not necessarily physically exhausting, but it's certainly more physical activity than I experienced when I used to lecture.  The real exhaustion, though, comes from how mentally taxing running a discussion-based classroom is. When lecturing, I could prepare the "script" for the day pretty well, especially after teaching a course for a few years and gaining both a solid knowledge of the material and the ability to second-guess the common questions that would come from the students.  Realistically, I wasn't doing a whole lot of daily assessment, and certainly wasn't doing the kind of constant analysis of the students' understanding I'm currently doing.  So, in this regard, running a discussion-based classroom is definitely more exhausting.

Interestingly, during a phone interview this week one of the questions I was asked was, "Do you find this way of teaching to be more difficult?"  My first reaction was that the interviewer clearly understood what actually happens in my classroom, because this is the first time I have been asked if teaching this way was more difficult.  I don't know if I would qualify running a  discussion-based classroom as being more difficult, though, since preparing a lecture can be fairly labor-intensive.  Although, after teaching a class for a few years, the preparation portion of a lecture-driven class can get easier.  Similarly, the preparation portion of a discovery-based class is fairly labor intensive; however, in my own experience, this year has been easier than last year in terms of preparation, and I can directly attribute that to the fact that we have the year of experience behind us.

All of this then begs the question: Why?  Why make the switch from a lecture-based classroom where I was comfortable?  What reasons could I give someone to include at least some discussion-based activities in their classroom?  Ultimately, I don't think it comes down to how the material is delivered to the students.  As I have said previously, I firmly believe that I cannot make sense of the material for any of my students, and that ultimately they need to make sense of the material for themselves.  In this, I firmly believe that discovery-based exercises followed by discussion is the best way to make this happen.  But to try to "sell" this to someone who is not including any discovery or discussion in their classroom can be difficult if not impossible.  Instead, I believe the more important distinction lies in the depth and the amount of the assessment I am able to do.  The big advantage from my perspective is that I get a much better feel for how well my kids have understood the material on a day-to-day basis.  The one thing I never realized was missing from  my classroom in the past was the day-to-day pulse of the learning that was happening (or not happening) in my classroom.  In particular, I never really knew how well the kids had caught what I had thrown to them until the next day when we went over the homework.  And even then, I really only knew that a few specific kids had trouble with a few specific exercises.  I didn't get the depth of understanding about where the kids were having trouble, where specifically they were making their mistakes, where precicely the holes in their understanding were...not even close.

The other question that commonly comes up is whether or not I think someone could include some discussion-based activities "tomorrow".  Honestly, I would say yes.  Even someone who uses a lecture-based format for delivery of the material could break the lecture up into smaller pieces and have the kids do an exercise or two in groups based on the short lecture.  The exercises could be discussed, with someone putting the proposed solution on the board while the teacher circulates among the students to assess whether or not they understood the new material.  The only additional preparation necessary would be having a few practice exercises on hand for the students to try.  And even in this it may not be any extra prep, since the teacher could simply take a few of the examples they had planned to do during their lecture and let the kids try them instead.  Would this be easier? Nope, it would be exhausting, since there would be a sharp increase in the amount of analysis of student work being done.  But sitting on the other side of this fence, the information gathered from this analysis would be more than worth it.

Thinking through all of this during the week, I came to the following conclusion: the goal of education is not for me to explain the material to the students.  The goal of education is for the students to correctly explain the material to me and to understand what it is they're explaining.  Running a discovery and discussion based classroom allows me to see, day-by-day, how well this goal is being met in my classroom, and this, more than anything else, is why I made the switch.

My Best Year of Teaching

I remember my first year in the classroom.  I taught choir, introduction to music, pre-algebra, algebra 1, and algebra 2.  I was teaching at a small school with only one part-time and three full-time math teachers.  Like most first years of teaching about which I have heard from other teachers, it was rough.  Looking back, I did a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong.  But the general consensus was that I had done well enough, and that after a few years of teaching things would get easier.  Which they did.

However, during those next few years I taught a few other subjects and switched over from half-day music and half-day math to full-day math.  I taught geometry, statistics, and pre-calculus, and since I was teaching something new pretty much every year I was never really able to get into a groove and get comfortable with the material.  Of course, switching schools didn’t change this, and within my first 10 years of teaching I had taught everything from pre-algebra through AP calculus and AP statistics.  What I gained from all of this was a solid feel and appreciation for the scope and sequence of a math curriculum.  I got to experience how the different pieces fit together, and today I see that as a personal strength.  For all of the instability at the time, I wouldn’t trade the experience of those years for anything.

My current experience is completely different.  I have been at my current school for 13 years, and for the last 12 I have taught at least a few sections of honors pre-calculus.  There were even a few years, including the last two, where I have taught nothing but honors pre-calculus.  This has given me the time to delve deeply into the material contained in the course, so that at this point I can all but second guess where the kids are going to have trouble and find the mistakes they make much more quickly. 

All that being said, I have never, in either experience, felt that I have had my best year of teaching.  I have never reached a point at which I felt things were “good enough”, that the materials I was using were “good enough”, and that I could sort of coast for a while.  Sadly, I have seen this “I can coast” attitude in many other teachers.  They seem to think that a teaching career should, in the long run, consist of coasting once things settle in.  Once they have been teaching the same course for a few years, they should be asked to teach nothing but that course for the remainder of their career, and they shouldn’t be required to do anything differently than that which they have been doing.  There is no improvement necessary, no reason to do anything differently.  They are comfortable, and after this many years of teaching they deserve to take it easy. This, of course, is the stereotypical tenured teacher, and while it certainly doesn’t describe all of the teachers I know, it certainly describes enough of them to make the stereotype reasonably valid.

I completely disagree with this attitude.  I want my best year of teaching to be my final year.  I want to constantly look for ways to improve what I am doing in the classroom, ways to help the kids learn the material more effectively and more completely.  I never want to be so comfortable with my teaching that I simply walk in each day, set the “auto pilot”, and go.  And it’s easy to tell which teachers feel this way and which ones don’t.  Mention “best practices” to a group of teachers, and then spell out the practices that they should be incorporating into their classroom.  Those who are open to at least vetting the practices and trying out those they see as being a good fit for their classroom are the teachers I want to work with.  Those who immediately conclude that their personal practices are the best, regardless of any research, are those that frustrate me. 

We talk a lot about ways to improve education.  One of the steps necessary is to humbly admit that we have yet to have our best year of teaching, and to constantly look for ways to make this year the best year yet.

Snow Days

Last Tuesday, school was cancelled for the sixth time this school year, which in the past would have meant that we would need to “make up” the day at the end of the school year.  However, the Ohio Department of Education has given the schools permission to give online assignments to students in lieu of making up the day.  There are some limitations to this, but last Tuesday fell into this category.  So, we posted a set of five questions on the class website and the kids were responsible for doing the exercises and turning them in.  For me, that meant the kids had to take a picture of their work and e-mail it to me by 8pm.  That way, I had a good idea before we got to school on Wednesday as to whether or not the kids struggled with the assignment.

The exercises we chose were from the exam review, and we were careful to select exercises that were either well within the grasp of the students at this point in the trimester, or that would require a minimal amount of “mental stretch”.  Overall, the results were wonderful.  Aside from mistakes that fall into the careless category (of the variety “1x1=2”), the students did remarkably well.  Yes, there were a few kids who on a few problems simply wrote something along the lines of “I’ve been staring at this for 30 minutes now and I have no idea where to even begin this problem”; however, the overwhelming majority of the students were able to complete all of the exercises, and for the most part they got the problems right.

Contrast this with what I heard from a few other teachers who, giving their kids what they considered to be easy assignments, had the kids return the next day with nothing completed because the kids did not know how to do the majority of the assignment.  What the teacher saw as easy review, the kids saw as unreasonable and impossible because the assignment wasn’t about the current material, and therefore they weren’t even willing to try (even though they admitted the material was review).

If nothing else, I’m proud of the fact that most of my kids were at least willing to make the attempt to solve the exercises and complete the assignment.  The persistence they showed on that assignment spoke volumes to me.  The fact that for the most part they were successful is even better.  They are growing as independent learners.  Isn’t that the whole point?