9/17 Entry
Today, I gave a diagnostic exam meant to determine where my students are in terms of developing science skills. My natural inclination is to help people who have questions, even though the entire point of a diagnostic is to identify a baseline level for my students. I did a great job of resisting my urge except for with one student in my period 5 class. I asked him questions that I do not think gave him any knowledge he didn't have, but what they did do was breakdown the problem so that he could approach it in a way that would allow him to access the problem. He got the correct answer after answering 2 of my questions. It made me really think about what was stopping him from attempting the question in the first place? Is it lack of confidence? Is it that he doesn't how to start a problem? When I ask him to give 100% effort, what does that mean to him? To me, it means that I want him to "try" every problem/question even if he doesn't think he knows the answer. I think the miscommunication may be around what it means to "try" a problem. I don't think he has practice in trying to work through questions that he doesn't know he knows the answer to. This may be for a few reasons. 1) He may be afraid of getting it wrong. 2) He may have developed the habit of just not doing the work when he doesn't know the answer, and his teachers have allowed it. Or 3) he may be used to teachers eventually just giving the answer to him if he stalls for long enough. For whatever reason it is, my interaction with him today made me think about an assumption I had about what it means to give 100% effort, and what it means to "try" a problem that you may be unsure about.
Teaching students how to "try" is something that needs to be taught.
Also, I have been going outside after school everyday to help get kids on the buses and to be there in case there's a fight. It has become a big part of my "second classroom." I see 7th graders that I had last year in addition to my current 8th graders. It's informative for me to see who is friends with who and what the social dynamic is grade-wide.
I wonder why the 7th grade is such a behaviorally "worse" grade than the 8th grade. One of the big differences that I have seen by observing after school social interactions is that the "cool" kids in the 7th and 8th grades have a different makeup. The cool kids in 8th grade have a mix of students that do and don't take kids seriously, but there is a sizeable contingent of kids that are respectful, and try hard in class. In 7th grade, the cool kids are almost entirely students that struggle to behave and do their work in class. I wonder how this happens and whether the administration and school environment in their respective 6th grade years has a formative effect on their social makeup.
Observations
-Many of my students struggle at trying problems that they don't initially know if they know the answer to.
-It seems that emphasizing and praising effort may help students try problems more than usual. I would call this more of an assumption than an observation right now, but I've seen it happen a couple of times in my classroom so far.
Questions
-How does the makeup of the group of popular kids impact the behavior of the whole grade?
-How have past teacher's expectations about how to approach difficult problems affected students?
-How much of an effect can praise have on increasing the likelihood that students try questions they don't know the answer to?
Dan,
ReplyDeleteReading your post has made me more reflective of my own classroom- so thank you! I am now questioning if I am encouraging students to really try, or if I give them the answer? I know you mentioned in your memo that teachers should be taught how to make kids try, and I couldn't agree more! I'm curious how you do this in your classroom and what strategies you use other than questioning?
Dan,
ReplyDeleteYou're right! Kids have to be taught to try. It makes me think about how students sometimes skip questions on an assessment. Why not try or even guess? Are kids afraid of making a mistake? Mistakes are part of the learning process.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDan, it is sort of a "Catch 22" situation concerning the helping of students. As attacher, it is your natural instinct to try to always help your students in any way. however, during a standardize test it is extremely hard to have my students constantly ask me for help and for me to say "Try your best", and not to be able to help them. Some of my 8th grade students were taking the STAR test today and one of their questions was what is the log135 = or what is the SINE of 90 degrees, clearly not 8th grade math. Why put this in, to show the student how much they do not know? I wonder about the mentality of these test makers.
ReplyDeleteYes! Kids do have to be encouraged to try. I recently gave my students the opportunity to work in pairs for a writing assignment (3-4 paragraphs). Mind you they wrote in long hand- some were complaining "My hand hurts!" Is this because they are used to typing on a computer? I can't even offer them the option as I have two PCs in my classroom and 24 students. I still encouraged them "to try" - they all finished eventually.
ReplyDeleteReally thoughtful post, Dan. I like your sentence that students need to be TAUGHT to try. We all make assumptions that this kind of thing is natural or inherent, but I don't think it is. Think about what "trying" means to you, and then find ways to teach it.
ReplyDelete