Good teaching day

Today, in class, I realized that I was not being a good teacher. I would ask a question and then scan the class looking for an answer. I drew a Voltage vs. current graph on the board for a ohmic resistor and asked the class to describe the graph. It was a simple question about a linear graph. As my class is a semicircle, I could then scan the faces of all of the students looking for a glimmer of hope. I heard nothing from even the more active students. I realized that by scanning the room, I was challenging them and they are not going to rise to the challenge if they think they are wrong. The trials of teaching 9th graders.

I turned away. I looked back at the board and erased some errant marks and moved out of the power position in the front of the room and futzed with some stuff at my computer. Still nothing.

I then turned to the class and suggested that they talk to their neighbor. Their partner. Now they are invested as a partner and not left out alone. When they answer, they are not alone in their position. After about 2 minutes, they all had something to say about the graph. We then placed the group understanding of the graphical qualities above the "right" answer.

It also hit me that those 2 minutes I "gave up" for partner discussion saved me 10 minutes of trying to ask the right questions to get a sense of their understanding. I hope this makes the class more about what they know and understand than what they can get right.

Now the bad thing I did.

I made a terrible mistake that may have unraveled the work we did to come together. We were discussing qualitative velocity time graphs and discussing the idealized graphs versus real world graphs. The idealized graphs change velocities instantaneously whereas real world graphs don't make those types of jumps. After some discussion on this, I made my fatal mistake. I said "I am not looking for... "

All of that work we did to make it about them was undone in a single sentence where I just turned it right back around and made it about me! What was I thinking? I can tell you I wasn't. Now it is all about how I will be grading them instead of what they understand. I hope this doesn't do irreparable harm to the culture that we are building in the classroom.

My glimmer of hope.

So with about 15 minutes left in class I started our next lab. On the previous lab, I showed a rolling cart and we went through a couple of steps to determine the variables we were going to test and arrive at a purpose statement. So this time I set up a ramp and started the cart at the high end and let it roll down. I let them know what area we were interested in observing and everyone took out their lab notebooks and started jotting down observations. Once I noticed this was happening organically, I let it happen and rolled the cart down the slope a few more times to give them time to observe.

Since they were already observing the motion, I decided to let them go through the next few steps with their partner as well and come up with some sort of purpose. I had expected to lead them through the procedure once or twice more but they seemed to get it so, let it happen. I then wrote on the smartboard, "variable pairs", a term I had never used before, and then looked at the class. There were a couple of people done so I asked what their variable pair was and they decided that they would like to do what we did in the last lab and relate position and time. YES!! GOT IT IN ONE!!! I didn't let my elation show and went to the rest of the groups and we ended up listing about 6 or 7 variable pairs. I then asked which one would be the easiest in their opinion. They voted on position and time! Again I did the little internal happy dance and we made a statement of purpose.

Purpose: To determine the relationship between Position and time. (of a cart rolling down an incline.)

The initial purpose stopped at time. I then asked if there was anything else they wanted to say and someone then volunteered the part in parentheses which we then added to our purpose. Another little happy dance.

We then talked about procedure. They suggested video analysis and sonic rangers. As soon as sonic rangers came up, there was some discussion about not having a wall to bounce the sound against. Several solutions were suggested and I kept my mouth shut. Then the bell rang and no one moved. I had to tell them to go but we would pick up here and complete the lab next class.

I had a good day teaching.