NOTE: I found this sitting in my drafts and published it as it was, which is kind of unfinished.
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I am a community college math instructor. I was educated in traditional (lecture/practice/test) classrooms, and I mostly succeeded in this environment, and I didn't really see much need for anything different. When I dropped out of graduate school, I managed to get a job working for Key Curriculum Press, a now-extinct company that published inquiry-based math curriculum. I didn't see this move as meaningful for me, career-wise, partly because I didn't really have any goals at the time (a topic for another blog post), and partly because, if I'm being honest, I saw it as being beneath me. I was, after all, trained in much higher level mathematical thinking. This attitude of mine led to a couple of gentle, and one or two not-so-gentle, nudges by some of my colleagues that I might consider trying out a new perspective (and a new approach for how I spoke with others). Well I worked for Key and KCP Technologies for nearly 4 years, and I met some amazing educators and learned a lot about inquiry-based instruction, plus of course was exposed to some wonderful materials and tools (toys!) for use in education. This primed me well for deciding that I wanted to get back into teaching. By fortunate coincidence, Key's downsizing and my layoff were exactly aligned with my deciding to get a teaching job and spring application season. A couple bumps down the road, I got my current position at City College of San Francisco.
When I started teaching at City College, I was totally game for guiding inquiry-based and collaborative learning. But, it turns out, having materials was not enough. Every time I tried to get students to be curious, I was met with resistance. Every time I tried to get students to work in groups, I was met with resistance. I had no training into how to make students more active and engaged. In the end, I settled on a style of giving clear lectures, regular homework, and regular quizzes and tests. I would try group work occasionally, because I had read (and kept reading) that collaborative work was somehow more effective, and I knew that I needed to get students talking math and explaining it to each other. But every single time I tried group work, it felt uncomfortable for me and for the students. Students were reluctant to move into groups, and most groups had at least one (if not four) students who was quiet, I assumed because they didn't feel they were smart enough to participate. I knew, I KNEW, that my teaching wasn't effective. In my very unscientific estimation, considering they types of engagement I got from my classes, I think I was providing meaningful instruction to about 20% of my students. But I had no clue how to change it. Every change I attempted to make was painful.
Jump to about 3 years ago, when I read Amanda Palmer's book, The Art of Asking. I do recommend it, if you're curious. What struck me most was Amanda's connection and community with her fans. She had that community from the beginning of her time performing as half of The Dresden Dolls, and she kept it up throughout her career. She is the one who introduced me to the notion that Twitter is a place for community. I had previously thought it was a place for individuals to express opinions and announce accomplishments to the world in 140 characters, and I simply wasn't interested in that. But through listening to her explanation of Twitter, I got on and found basically two or three people I knew of in the math ed world, followed them, and then proceeded very cautiously to view their networks and very selectively follow a few more people. Within one hour of getting onto Twitter, I managed to find an open invitation to a local meet-up of real humans, which was going to meet (omg omg omg) at Desmos HQ. So uh... yeah. This was the beginning of me finding some community.
But the online math ed community wasn't what I was writing about here. It was about transforming my teaching. So through this newly discovered community, I learned generally about the concept of student-centered learning. It took a loooong time for me to understand what this means. I think, no matter what your first introduction is to this concept, you won't get it until you try it. These days, my teaching is FAR more student-centered than it was three years ago, but it still has a long way to go. I have gone through a whirlwind of changing my teaching in the past three years, and I'm about to go on sabbatical because I need it. I am exhausted, from all of the changing and trying and failing and learning and adjusting and failing and succeeding and failing and trying and trying and trying. It has been an exhilarating journey, and I'm a better teacher for it, but right now I need (a) a rest, and (b) some time to step back and assimilate all of the things that I've been learning and trying.
So. My teaching today looks very different than how it looked when I started. My instruction is far more student-centered, but it still has a long way to go. I'm not satisfied with how I teach, but I am far more satisfied with my understanding of my goals as an educator. I know from experience that the process of changing from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching is extremely difficult. It's difficult to change habits; it's difficult to embrace new methods. It's also difficult to understand what it means to support flexible thinking without implicitly giving students the message that the correct answer is the most important part. I have been in meetings with colleagues, where we have talked about the importance of allowing for failure, and acknowledging that getting things wrong is a valid and even necessary part of the process of learning. Yet nobody in the room could give an idea of what to do when a student gives an incorrect answer to a question, other than to point out where they are wrong (and thereby give students the message that their contribution to the discussion was not the contribution that we were looking for. Now I have a much more extensive toolset for supporting flexible student thinking, and for helping students to find their own ways of correcting their errors and moving to a more correct understanding. I am much better than I used to be at listening to students, like really listening to them, understanding what they are thinking, validating what they are thinking, and connecting to them on the level of how they are thinking about a thing, rather than how I am thinking about it. This is not a skill that you can read about and perform, and it is not a thing that you can do in the context of a regular lecture; it is a thing that takes lots of practice, in the context of a non-lecture forum. It can sort of happen as a small piece of a lecture, but lectures are not really a place where flexible student thinking is well supported.
What's the one change that I made to practice this skill?
There is one thing that I can point to for transforming my approach, and for giving me practice in listening to my students, and that is incorporating number talks. I don't call them number talks in class, because that title sounds elementary to me, and I'm very cautious about my adult students feeling condescended to. I call them mental math practice. If you don't know about number talks, you should. Here is one explanation of how to do a number talk. There are many more if you are interested, and many videos to watch. The main thing is to (a) get students thinking mentally, (b) give students time to think, (c) get the answer(s) out of the way quickly, without validation of "this one is right and these ones are wrong", and (d) focus on the process. It is best done if you incorporate visuals into the explanations.
