Yesterday, I had a conversation with Charli, a wonderful math teacher, that has been rattling around in my head. I am interested in what it means for teachers, their coaches, and their students.
The conversation happened to be centered around Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms, which we are implementing more and more in our high schools and middle schools. A teacher I’ll call Lynn went all-in this year with Liljedahl’s techniques (tons of partner work on non-permanent vertical surfaces, with problems that encourage conceptual rather than procedural understanding), and had some incredible results with some of our struggling-est students. Once her colleagues saw that, they started trying it, and now we’ve got what looks like it might be a movement.
Historically, Charli has also been wonderful with struggling math students. Her not-so-secret sauce has always been relationships. Community circles, inside jokes, palpable love and belonging, a love of the underdog, asset-based thinking, lots of equity ideals: it’s a classroom I’d love to have either of my sons in.
Charli saw Lynn’s engagement data (kids, according to a survey I give, liked math a ton more in January than they did when they met Lynn in September). She checked in with our math coach and made this most recent unit heavily Liljedahl-influenced.
She said she didn’t like it and the kids didn’t either.
“Kids like me,” she said, “because I help them. They don’t feel like they’ve been helped by their teachers in the past, but when they get here, they know I will help them do it.”
On the other hand, she says, “I like this (Liljedahl) because it makes the kids into thinkers instead of plug-and-chug robots.”
Boom. Right there, we had the big struggle that Charli was facing. From that struggle should come some conclusion (perhaps aided by how the kids did on the most recent test).
On the one hand, she likes helping kids, and kids like her because she helps them.
On the other hand, the “help” she has given creates plug-and-chug situations rather than the sort of conceptual thinking and understanding she most wants.
Helpfulness vs. deep thought. Two conflicting values. But they don’t have to be.
The resolution to Charli’s dilemma might come down to re-thinking the definition of the word “help.”
I’ve been in classrooms with teachers who are passionate about very legitimate notions about math that I passionately agree with. Constructivism, for one thing. The idea–that is true when we think about anything we have learned well–that when we struggle through a thing and figure it out, our neurons rewire to accommodate the new thing in a way that they don’t when someone just tells it to us. In some of those classrooms, the students really, actively dislike the teacher. Because what the teacher sees as “they’ll struggle through this and have deeper knowledge in the end than if I stepped over there and helped them,” the students see as “she refuses to help me.” I think I feel for both teacher and students in this situation.
I don’t believe that even one of Lynn’s students would say they didn’t feel helped and supported by Lynn. Because of the Liljedahlian way her classroom is set up, she can position herself in the center of the room and look out at all the vertical surfaces (whiteboards) that line all four walls. If someone is not getting a foothold on the topic, she might head over and either throw them a bone or point at a neighbor who is figuring it out. What she does NOT do is demonstrate a problem for them. She follows a rule that another successful math teacher in our building follows: do not walk around the room with a writing implement, because that means the kids have to write instead of the teacher.
Lynn’s kids recognize that she is helping them. Charli’s, because her help has been more hands-on, and because she often has a writing implement in her hand and often did a sample problem for them, might believe that the new Liljedahl approach is less helpful than the old.
This leaves both Charli and me with a struggle.
How do we get the kids to redefine and reconceptualize teacher “help” in a way that promotes deeper thinking?
In fact, Charli suggested to me, should we even get them to redefine “thinking?” Or, related to that, to redefine “math”?
It’s a big change, from the way math has been done since I was learning it to some of the shifts now. Big, but also (I believe) good. Still, it requires a redefinition of the roles of teacher and student that introducing it in April may have been a tough haul. Nevertheless, I am excited to see if Charli’s new form of “help” resulted in good results on the most recent test. I’ll know soon.
What do you believe “help” is in a classroom? How do you communicate that definition with your students?