Attended a free webinar from O’Reilly media Thursday hosted by Dan Meyer, a math teacher from Santa Cruz. The seminar was boldly title “How to save Math Education”
Even if you are not a math teacher, this is talking about getting students to think…and applies to all teachers really. It’s just hidden in a math webinar.
Dan talks a mile a minute, but here are some highlights I managed to jot down while he was talking.
Talked about Deadwood writer David Milch, who espouses that students today are being entertained via media in a way that makes them crave easy resolution to problems. The one-hour crime drama gets neatly tied up at the end. Our students have an impatience with irresolution, they want easy answers and do not tolerate failure well.
Be less helpful
Dan talked about how he has been perfecting his facial expression when faced with questions from students. He prefers to always give them the quizzical look whether or not they bring him the right answer. He responds to the right answer and the wrong answer in the same ways.
“Right, why?”
“Give me the wrong answer”
Skill practice yes, Dan is still a proponent that this is essential.
But sees the need to address a bigger problem in math education and that is
“How to get students thinking about math reasoning in the world around them”
A great guiding question.
He mentioned a muji cronotebook… clock in the middle of pages, as an example. Bare, structure has to be built around it by the user. Same idea for math problems.
Talked about “The Wire” which has no musical cues for who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, so the audience has to be smart enough to figure it out on their own. Dan runs his classes this way.
Dan will often start with an image on the screen and start a conversation about it with the students.
For example a photograph of a blurred tennis ball against a background.
The next snippet of info revealed is that the exposure for the photo (using data in iphoto stored about the photo) is 1/25, a twenty fifth of a second.
Slowly he layers a framework on top of a problem and has the students have a conversation about it.
- He Builds from multimedia
- Asks concise questions
- Encourages Intuition
- Scales in difficulty
- Iterates (uses more than one picture)
- Transmits fast
His shopping cart blog post, went viral, shows that his ideas are gaining traction.
Cognizent that kids learn when they are improving old knowledge and filling in the creacks and fissures of old knowledge.
Dan teaches remedial algebra with students who have not succeeded because they have suffered from boredom, low confidence, did not do homework. He finds them eager to find out if they are correct. He approaches them with a rehabilatative process, gets with comfortable with the process of building a framework of answering their own questions.
The results he sees in his students over time is that they wait longer to give answers, they are confident with the wrong answer, they can verbalize their process more fluently.
In the chatroom Kathy Sierra mentioned a book that we all should read. What the Best college Teachers Do by Ken Bain. (As, are all book recommendations I hear about it’s now on request from my library.)
Dan is creating a website with this style of curriculum pieces called belesshelpful.com, he gave a chuckle when mentioning a launch time of Spring 2010. If you want to beta test, he mentions to contact him via dm or email.
I for one can’t wait to see the site. My main question is why does this not fly so well in schools, it should be spreading much more quickly. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Most classrooms have a projector, images are so easy to create, many cameras and phones have video, so that is really easy to create. You can cut youtube videos to the exact point you want to show them. The barriers to creating the starting point for this kind of lesson is not very high. Is it the ideas? Is it time? Maybe the interest in the shopping cart lesson might start to break open the math classroom. Hope so.
Chat Clip
from Dan Meyer to All Participants:
dan@mrmeyer.com
from Lindsey fallow to All Participants:
@dan – do you encourage kids to teach / guide each other? Or does it all flow through you?
from Brian Danielak to All Participants:
@lindsey – great question
from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:
I’d love to see *students* learn to create these.
from Kathy Sierra to All Participants:
Dan’s ultimate BLH (Be Less Helpful) points a way that allows for WIDE variety of implementations, topics, delivery mechanisms, teacher styles, etc.
Even if you don’t teach math, this is about teaching kids to think, to use their intuition, to be comfortable with being in the process of discovering, rather than trying to resolve quickly the “correct” answer that the teacher is eager to hear.
For more information about Dan, go and check out his blog. Subscribe in a reader. At least read this post
I found out about this webinar through twitter, I have quite a few others saved in evernote, so stop by, in the next few days I plan to put them all in a blogpost. Free professional development can only be a good thing to share.
Anyway, blog comments always make the rest of the day shinier, that's what it is here for.....
FYI: I now run small (2-4 people) classes and individual online tech sessions
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