teaching

A Jean-Luc Moment

September 23, 2010 Shawn Cornally

{ The title for this post was shamelessly adapted from Jason Buell }

I have a practicum student right now. She is completely awesome. She’s the kind of university student that wants to get her hands dirty on day one, and, as you can imagine, that makes me happy. What’s even more awesome, is that she’s predominantly a biology person, but she’s hanging like a champion with my physics classes.

I’m not the best cooperating teacher, though. I’m externally unorganized, I’m frustratingly distracted, and my lesson plans rarely break the ten-word mark. These are not good things, but I still manage to get through each day happy and still in love with teaching.

However, for a practicum student, I’m sure this is infuriating. So, I decided to just give her half of my class. We’ve split physics into two groups (Gryffindor and Slytherin, if you must know. She’s McGonangall, I’m Snape.)

Why not just give her the whole class? Selfishly, I’d get bored. Selflessly, I think she needs to see how I would teach the same thing in parallel, so that she can compare the results of our different approaches and styles. This seems to be working out well.

Although we did have a rather Jean-Luc Picard moment recently. We gave an assessment over the concept of energy conservation. In the realm of SBG, this assessment assessed the students’ understanding of complex combinations of kinetic and potential energy, as well as the acceleration of a freely falling body.

Many students absolutely failed the assessment. They left things blank, or wrote nonsense. This is a horrifying position for a teacher to be in. All sorts of insane things start floating through your mind, “OMG, they don’t know anything. I’m an awful teacher. They haven’t been doing their homework, now I’m going to have to require that they turn it in. This whole SBG thing has failed, they don’t get it, and they’re not worried about it, OMGTHEY’RENOTMATUREENOUGHFORTHISWHATHAVEIDONEITHINKI’MMELTING.”

We had to decide what was best for our class. Thankfully, the philosophy of SBG provides us with a much more useful framework for interpreting such ghastly results:

1. What did this assessment tell us about the students’ current states of understanding?
2. How can this assessment be used to inform decisions as to how to move the students toward greater proficiency?
3. What can this teach students about true responsibility?

A few years ago, I would have turned tail and fled from my hippy-dippy grading philosophy. Today, here’s how I respond:

1. This assessment showed me that these students didn’t understand how to apply energy conservation to this type of situation. i.e.: they did not recognize the need for energy conservation, and were left without any options of attack. (thus the punting)
2. This assessment becomes a qualitative feedback opportunity. It also tells me that we need to spend less time doing math and more time explaining when and where energy can be used to describe a system. Check.
3. The students that had chosen to ignore the suggested practice problems were woefully reminded of their immature decision. Perhaps this will naturally direct them towards doing some practice to avoid long hours after school trying to reassess something they barely understand. (Responsibility cannot be graded, folks)

I want to model this for my practicum student. I want her to see that a room built around learning, and nothing else, is the only classroom that serves students. No points for notebooks, no points for practicing, no points for being good. Those are all things humans do because they want/need to.

Our activities in class now center around generating context for our mathematical ideas, so that the students may gain extensibility, no matter whether that extension is: a narrative assessment, a moment of clarity while observing something interesting, or, perhaps, the construction of something useful.

Did you really think I was going to go this long without a post about assessment? Honestly.