I knew of Saturday morning's keynote speaker, Catherine Fosnot, from an article or two I'd read in Tolman Library at UC Berkeley, but she was just a name to me. That would change ten minutes after she began speaking.
I immediately was introduced to a part of classroom life that I'd never encountered before. She showed us a fascinating bit of film of some third graders discussing a math problem. At first all I got out of it was that one girl was pushy and the other girl was confused. Then Fosnot began doing some exegesis and I realized that both girls were doing rather high order math reasoning. They were discovering basic tenets of math (among others, the distributive properties) without anyone telling them.
Monday, October 21, 2013
Friday, October 18, 2013
Friday afternoon
I've never gone to one of these conventions without having at least one session be a waste of time. This time I gave up an hour of my life to discuss whether lessons addressed the "Tenets of Constructivism" and whether they "attended to the implications of the learning domains". An hour about vocabulary. A bunch of check lists. The people who led the class are smart people run a university program in the summer that teaches constructivist methods. But this session had nothing to do with actually doing anything in the classroom. It should have been titled: "Are you a good Constructivist?"
The biggest problem with these annual ACT conferences for me is that there is virtually nothing here for secondary teachers. And especially nothing for secondary teachers in non-science or math areas. But the principals are still relevant for me and I often get good ideas from sessions that mostly concern elementary students. The 2:30 breakout today had nothing remotely connected to my work, so I went to a session about playing with bubbles.
The idea is simple. Get kids playing, let them have fun, and they will be more open to learning the scientific principles that underlie the activity. You play with bubbles and at some point you ask the teacher, "why did Johnny's bubble break when I touched it, but mine didn't?" Which allows you to explain something about surface tension to them or some other concept. We also built ramps and rolled down marbles of various shapes and sizes, and we experimented with air pressure (blowing things through plastic tubing).
It was fun, but I finished without any good ideas for my practice, until we were cleaning up.
Then Gertrude Stein came to mind. Gertrude, who grew up two blocks from my home of 39 years, was the closest thing to a seven year old author. She loved to play with words as objects. She wrote nonsense poems, for instance, created purely for the sake of making interesting sounds; blowing bubbles with words.
When I get back I'm going to see if I can use some of her poems to inspire my students to be freer with words. Right now they are very constrained in their verbal expressions. Years of having their spelling and grammar red-penciled have induced in them a conservatism that frustrates me. If I'm going to break them out of this straight jacket I need a way to blow their minds. Gertrude might be the answer.
My old friends from East Tennessee University, a hotbed of constructivist pedagogy, led a session about "emergent curriculum". I didn't really understand most of it. I heard them say that we too often have a "deficit model" of student thinking. We try to deal with what they don't know instead of exploiting the intelligence they do have. Sounds good, and I think that is something I instinctively try to do (see my Gertrude Stein remarks above), but I couldn't follow the logic well enough to yield any good ideas for the moment. They gave me an article to read, which might help.
The general subject of the talk seemed to be about how researchers could lead teachers to rethink their practices by more closely observing their interactions with students and by getting the teachers to dig deeper into the assumptions they bring to the classroom.
I have a couple article in my files about how teachers respond to student questions, how they dig behind the question to reveal the confusion that inspired it, something I'm not always good at. I need to find that article.
The biggest problem with these annual ACT conferences for me is that there is virtually nothing here for secondary teachers. And especially nothing for secondary teachers in non-science or math areas. But the principals are still relevant for me and I often get good ideas from sessions that mostly concern elementary students. The 2:30 breakout today had nothing remotely connected to my work, so I went to a session about playing with bubbles.
The idea is simple. Get kids playing, let them have fun, and they will be more open to learning the scientific principles that underlie the activity. You play with bubbles and at some point you ask the teacher, "why did Johnny's bubble break when I touched it, but mine didn't?" Which allows you to explain something about surface tension to them or some other concept. We also built ramps and rolled down marbles of various shapes and sizes, and we experimented with air pressure (blowing things through plastic tubing).
It was fun, but I finished without any good ideas for my practice, until we were cleaning up.
Then Gertrude Stein came to mind. Gertrude, who grew up two blocks from my home of 39 years, was the closest thing to a seven year old author. She loved to play with words as objects. She wrote nonsense poems, for instance, created purely for the sake of making interesting sounds; blowing bubbles with words.
When I get back I'm going to see if I can use some of her poems to inspire my students to be freer with words. Right now they are very constrained in their verbal expressions. Years of having their spelling and grammar red-penciled have induced in them a conservatism that frustrates me. If I'm going to break them out of this straight jacket I need a way to blow their minds. Gertrude might be the answer.
My old friends from East Tennessee University, a hotbed of constructivist pedagogy, led a session about "emergent curriculum". I didn't really understand most of it. I heard them say that we too often have a "deficit model" of student thinking. We try to deal with what they don't know instead of exploiting the intelligence they do have. Sounds good, and I think that is something I instinctively try to do (see my Gertrude Stein remarks above), but I couldn't follow the logic well enough to yield any good ideas for the moment. They gave me an article to read, which might help.
The general subject of the talk seemed to be about how researchers could lead teachers to rethink their practices by more closely observing their interactions with students and by getting the teachers to dig deeper into the assumptions they bring to the classroom.
I have a couple article in my files about how teachers respond to student questions, how they dig behind the question to reveal the confusion that inspired it, something I'm not always good at. I need to find that article.
 |
| The Brooklyn skyline from the ferry returning from the conference. |
 |
| We had a party after today's sessions. It was at a rooftop bar. The Empire State Building was less than seven blocks away. |
If you would like a terrific view of the Manhattan skyline take yourself to the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn and hie over to the East River Ferry about 20 minutes before dawn. There to your right, at about 50 degrees is the Chrysler Bldg; at 30 degrees the Empire State Bldg; at 320 the new World Trade Center obscured by some smoke stacks.
The first ferry was headed to Wall Street. I looked to see if the brokers were nervous. The market is mostly up, but New York is about to lose its jillionaire Wall-Street-brother-in-arms Mr. Bloomberg. He's been mayor for 50 terms, I think, but now he's leaving and his Democratic replacement (the GOP guy hasn't a chance according to the polls) shocked everybody by announcing that he'd like to charge rent to charter schools. Bloomberg did everything but personally clean the urinals at charters during his term. They stayed rent free in public school buildings. Often if you entered a six story school structure in the city you'd find that the first and second floor belonged to The Friendship Academy Charter School or some such. The upper floors were P.S. 56. Guess who got the library.
The conference is being held at the Museum of Mathematics, 26th and Madison. A clever idea. Many of the talks will center on math education, of course, but I see enough other stuff in the program to keep me interested.
I got to the conference after a refreshing 20 minute walk. The keynote speaker was a math professor from Old Dominion, Dr. Adam. He's a popularizer of math, meaning he tells jokes and shows pictures of beautiful geometric patterns from nature. I couldn't follow everything he said but he did tell us about some interesting websites where people post nice pictures: search for OPOD, EPOD, and APOD. The last one is astronomy pictures. In the question period after his talk he noted that, with his own students he aims to hear one say, "I saw this neat thing today that I never noticed before." The true beginning of education.
I then went to a presentation by a Mills College professor, Linda Kroll, a sort of general intro to constructivism. We explored the museum and then sat down intermittently to discuss our own reactions to what we saw. She noted that one of her students had come up with an acronym designed to teach people what constructivism is:
S = social
A = active
I = integrated (not just one area of study at a time)
L = learner centered
E = empowering
R = reflective, relevant
All good, but too general to persuade anyone who'd never heard of this. Who hasn't been to a teaching lecture where they told us we were supposed to create lessons like those?
Social? my kids are too social; they don't use their interactions for my kind of learning
Active? they are active, and I try to get them to be active, but how to prevent over-activity is the problem.
Integrated? try that with a pacing guide
Learner centered? They are already too self centered
Empowering? obviously a problem sometimes with teens
Reflective? Not a forte for 14 year olds.
But I still think this is the way to go rather than passive, non-social, confining lectures or teacher-centered classrooms. Someday I'll figure out how to do it. Just before I retire.
The conference is being held at the Museum of Mathematics, 26th and Madison. A clever idea. Many of the talks will center on math education, of course, but I see enough other stuff in the program to keep me interested.
I got to the conference after a refreshing 20 minute walk. The keynote speaker was a math professor from Old Dominion, Dr. Adam. He's a popularizer of math, meaning he tells jokes and shows pictures of beautiful geometric patterns from nature. I couldn't follow everything he said but he did tell us about some interesting websites where people post nice pictures: search for OPOD, EPOD, and APOD. The last one is astronomy pictures. In the question period after his talk he noted that, with his own students he aims to hear one say, "I saw this neat thing today that I never noticed before." The true beginning of education.
I then went to a presentation by a Mills College professor, Linda Kroll, a sort of general intro to constructivism. We explored the museum and then sat down intermittently to discuss our own reactions to what we saw. She noted that one of her students had come up with an acronym designed to teach people what constructivism is:
S = social
A = active
I = integrated (not just one area of study at a time)
L = learner centered
E = empowering
R = reflective, relevant
All good, but too general to persuade anyone who'd never heard of this. Who hasn't been to a teaching lecture where they told us we were supposed to create lessons like those?
Social? my kids are too social; they don't use their interactions for my kind of learning
Active? they are active, and I try to get them to be active, but how to prevent over-activity is the problem.
Integrated? try that with a pacing guide
Learner centered? They are already too self centered
Empowering? obviously a problem sometimes with teens
Reflective? Not a forte for 14 year olds.
But I still think this is the way to go rather than passive, non-social, confining lectures or teacher-centered classrooms. Someday I'll figure out how to do it. Just before I retire.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)