/blog_archive/2015/07/05/social-interactions-and-time/ iteration, making, building, and coding in education Sun, 05 Jul 2015 16:16:14 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.6 /blog_archive/2015/07/05/social-interactions-and-time/#comment-387 Sun, 05 Jul 2015 16:16:14 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=2247#comment-387 […] Evan, I think you may have revealed the heart of why teachers balk at moving from lecture, “I-we-you, and other lessons structures that teach algorithms and tricks: leading students through this process of mathematical discussion feels very out of control, it’s hard to listen to our students struggle, and it takes patience and time. Read Evan’s full post. […]

]]> /blog_archive/2015/07/05/social-interactions-and-time/#comment-386 Sun, 05 Jul 2015 13:34:30 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=2247#comment-386 I think you may have revealed the heart of why teachers balk at changing from lecture, “I-we-you, and other lessons structures that teach algorithms and tricks: leading students through this process of mathematical discussion feels very out of control, it’s hard to listen to our students struggle, and it takes patience and time. Our school is moving to block, A-B next year. We have teachers who have calculated the actual minutes we will lose in class time, and are stressing about covering every standard and not having time to teach the lessons, and we have those(like me) who think about the ability to get to those conversations now that classes are longer, to be able to work in connecting ideas without interruption, and the resulting 2 day (before they see us again) “wait time” that has been shown to be beneficial for longer term memory retention of material. I have been including student conversation in my classes since day one. They have to be led into productive talk, but once they get the hang of it, it gets better. I am reading Intentional Talk so that I can get better at leading the specific types of conversations (I hadn’t thought about the specific types of conversations my students were having – I recognized some of the distractions I was creating!). It takes confidence to facilitate, and practice. One of the best ways I can think of to “practice” would be to have the meeting leader, during curriculum meetings, or other brief pd sessions, to deliberately foster this type of conversation, and give/get feedback about how the conversation feels, what supported the conversation, what derailed it, and about any feelings of out-of-control-ness. I would also like to see support of the conversation with information about the effectiveness of these conversations, both for our meetings, as well as for our students! My kids are so much happier when they truly understand the material than when they are trying to memorize the lesson.

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