Intentional Classroom Culture: a cry for help.

Every semester and every class, I wonder what the classroom culture is going to be. I often have very positive classroom cultures, and I often attribute that largely to my approach to teaching [pats own back]. However, every once in a while I have a class where everything falls apart, and the class feels like poison to walk into. The class is grumpy and doesn't want to work or think, and I turn from prompting participation to requesting it, or even begging. Usually I am unable to turn such a class around to a positive and supportive culture. I know that my students hate it every bit as much as I do, and we all just wish the semester would end. This might manifest as a class that is just non-participatory and sluggish, or worse as a class that is actively vocalizing bad attitudes. When the latter happens, I can usually point to 1 or 2 students who were vocal about their bad attitudes in just the right way to infect the entire class.

Wait.

This is also true of the great classes. The classes that I love to walk into, where everyone has become friends, and they are texting on weekends to talk about math, and they all go "wow" whenever we settle another concept. Those classes, too, I can usually point to 1 or 2 students who were vocal about their positive attitudes in just the right way to infect the entire class. So maybe it's not about my approach to teaching [hold off on that self-back-pat].

I mean, I know that I do some good things as a teacher, and I firmly believe that I generally influence my classroom cultures toward the positive side of the spectrum. But I want to find ways to be far more intentional about the specific classroom culture I engineer, so that it is less dependent on the particular group of students that make up the class.

This semester, I have to observe a colleague in a class that has turned to poison. He's looking for help, and I honestly don't know what to say to help him. So I'm turning to the internet: what resources can you suggest, say reading materials or specific tools to try, to help us recover from unproductive/uncomfortable classroom culture? And what resources do you have to help us get better at engineering a more intentional classroom culture from the beginning?

I feel like it's relevant to mention that I teach at a community college, where students are adults who are in our classrooms for 150–250 minutes per week, and the classrooms are almost all built to cram exactly 45 students sitting side-by-side and facing the front of the room. None of these outright barriers, but definitely large hurdles for a lot of the group-work goals I aspire to. Also, I still think I'd have this issue even if I had better group-work habits in the classroom.

Thoughts on Subtraction

Est. reading time: 20 min

Prologue

My first advice on teaching, when I first became a TA in my Master's program, was a 2-page list of Do's and Don'ts. I don't remember most of them, or even how many they were but I do remember the first three.

1. Know more than your students
2. Know a lot more than your students
3. Never tell your students everything you know.

This advice comes back to me approximately once a month, and its meaning always has subtle differences from the last time. I think it's extremely important advice. It's probably my most used benchmark for deciding how to participate in all sorts of discussions. The first point is a little "duh," but the second point makes you stop and meditate a little on the importance of the first. For anyone who has taught for more than 10 years, you get a sense of why 1 and 2 are important. But then, there's the importance of 3.  I thought 3 was a little silly and perhaps just a tad elitist for the first few years of teaching. But then, little by little, the power of 3 has crept up. I feel like, for me at least, there is a lot of wisdom in 3. Especially when it follows 1 and 2.

Here's an example.

Subtraction has been bothering me for some time now, and I've only recently started paying attention to this bother. I have been evolving the ways I've guided conversations around subtraction for the past few years, and I generally feel good about how the conversations go. However, I am always keenly aware of what parts of the conversation I'm leaving out (à la 3),  and I'm wondering what parts I should start adding in (yes, I note the pun of this sentence).

Subtraction Survey Says!

These are the results from my survey, as of sometime today. Here I'm simply recording the results, unabridged, and with very little of my personal input. If you're interested in the greater context in which I collected this input, you can find it here.

The survey was posted on Twitter. I've left the survey open, in case you want to experience it first-hand, but I'm probably never going to go back to look at it.

Can you take a 2- to 7-minute survey for me? What images look like subtraction pictures to you? #MTBoShttps://t.co/WF7oBILnb7 pic.twitter.com/XNTOC6Bv87

— Kendra Lockman (@klockmath) July 29, 2017

The survey asks the same question, Does this picture show the operation 9–2? about six different pictures, and asks people to explain why they answered the way they did. Notice that the platform I used for collecting the survey was Desmos Activity Builder, so the results are stated with the participants being called "students."

Post Pi-Day Reflection

I have been teaching Pre-algebra and Basic Math this semester, for my first time. It has been an overwhelmingly positive and eye-opening experience. Every week I think I should be blogging about my experiences, and every week I fail to prioritize it. So, tonight I start.

This week, Monday afternoon, I received a tweet from a former Key Curriculum Press colleague

@klockmath Can you recreate the famous pi-petaled rose for tomorrow using @Desmos ?

— Vishakha Parvate (@VishakhaParvate) March 13, 2017

so I did. This post is motivated partly by the fact that I shared the graph on Twitter, and I feel like the graph on its own feels empty. It's missing the conversation that we had around it, so it felt a bit like sharing my bullet-point notes for a story, rather than the story itself. So here's the story.

Taking a "How to Be a Better Student" Class to Help Me Teach Better

I'm in the process of developing an online course, and one of the things that this has pushed me on is my own struggles with self-discipline and self-motivation and self-organization. I saw that our school offers a 1-unit, 6-week online course on how to be a successful online student. I figured, for one thing, I could definitely use some of the tools that they'll teach in that course, and for another, I'd like to have a good understanding of what's in that course so I can (a) be informed about how I direct students to take it, and (b) use some of the tools of the course to support my students' online learning.

The first week had us do a Discovery and Intention journal assignment. I put a lot of work and thought into writing this, and I'm convinced that it's going to make my life better.