I would like to see tapes of several classroom lessons — not staged lessons — but typical day to day lessons. What does it look like for the ownership in the learning process to gradually move to the students? What does it look like to use WCYDWT lessons on a regular basis?

There are many claims about knifes that are sharp enough to cut through disengagement. I realize there are obstacles to releasing videos, but it would be awfully nice to see some demonstrations instead of a bunch of folks arguing about who has the sharpest knife.

One important note. Remarkably, you seem to equate WCYDWT to a traditional curriculum. One that is described in the paper you cite (Luehmann) as a ‘transmission model where “teachers
are there to tell and students to listen.”

If part of my professional development is tightening what WCYDWT is and where it fits, I think I’ve made some progress.

Because that quote describes exactly what it isn’t.

We intentionally build that into our course structures so that the ownership in the learning process gradually moves from teacher to student, at a number of scales. But that move seems to be the key, and that’s where I see the success in my own teaching. I worry about teachers that don’t make that move. And I worry more about students that never get to experience that type of ownership in their learning (resulting in the ever more passive consumption of knowledge).

I think the WCYDWTs definitely disrupt the notion of teacher as sole authority in the learning process. That’s really commendable and is probably the reason the method has gained so much attention. Rightfully so. I don’t want to lose the fact that we’re largely arguing about a matter of degrees along the spectrum. Max adds the temporal aspect to the debate, and that’s really important for us to consider, especially in course design.

Regarding some of the other issues you raise. I guess I think that any curricular innovation will fail, or at best remain inadequate, unless it attends to, and is somewhat shaped by, the sociocultural reality of its implementation. That is, curriculum doesn’t really exist until it’s embodied in practice. That’s a highly localized process. The history of educational reform is littered with “generalizable” silver bullets that fall short in their implementation. How are standardized tests working out in practice these days? What’s the carnage that results from the assumptions about learning that are embedded in that particular practice?

Also, I hesitate to position the sociocultural against the practical, as you seem to be doing above. I would argue that they’re intimately related. What’s practical is socioculturally responsive.

What I sense Dan, and I’m not going to go too far into the PhD weeds here for the sake of the readers, is that we just have different epistemological stances about how teaching and learning occurs. Perhaps this is the source of our struggle?

I’m also not sure if I’ve answered your last question at all either. I need to think some more about that. And thank you for this conversation. Know that it’s pushing me as well. And I’m still going to buy you that beer at some future AERA.

I also think that students (like their teachers) can learn to get better at being curious about their world, and eventually figuring out for themselves what else they would need to know. I imagine you saw that in your classes… the wonderings converged. The requests for information became clearer and more useful. Maybe they started mentioning times they saw something in the world and felt like they were in your class. They thought what you were doing was powerful and began to see a role for themselves doing it, and even what it would take to get better at it.

Focusing on getting the teachers good at making really powerful questions to explore has to come first, but I’m still holding out hope that when all their teachers are this good, by the time they get to high school they’re coming in with a (digital) folder of stuff they’ve captured that they want to know more about.

As Shawn Cornally illustrates in his TED video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPeKdXhGcZQ&feature=player_embedded), kids can ask good questions and learn from them when we can make institutions get out of the way, and we eventually have to trust that there is actually math in kids’ real world that they will be curious about. But right now we have to start by selling them that idea since they’ve had over a decade (if they’re high school) to learn otherwise, and we have to train ourselves first to get over what we thought we knew about “word problems”

So I would like to offer the idea that we can have a vision of students getting better at noticing and wondering about math at the same time that we work really hard to equip teachers to do it for students first.

Joe H.: Instead of constantly trying to sell knives, I simply ask you to think about what the students might try to sell to you?

I think you’re right: that is simple.

I’m probably just the wrong receptor for this kind of signal, which prompted my curiosity about how other audiences in other fora perceive your koans and aphorisms about giving up and letting go and etc. I just don’t envy the task of scaling your intervention without a large satchel of practical exercises of the kind Marc offered here. A non-trivial fraction of the millions of teachers in the world are going to be put-off by your implication that their biggest challenge is sociocultural rather than practical. I am one of them.

Any time I think about engaging you on this ground, I remind myself I’m just gonna get some trip about how I must be power-mad or insufficiently interested in what my students are interested in, and restrain myself. Since I couldn’t leave well enough alone this time, here’s a question for the road:

If only a handful of teachers online can pull off this WCYDWT / 3ACT curriculum design, how is assigning that same task to students anything but cruel and unusual?

However, I still stand by the crux of my comment.

To engage the meat of your question. I work with pre-service science teachers. We do engage in professional development around inquiry-based, student-centered science teaching, although not in the typical one-off PD variety that has been shown as ineffective over and over again. Here’s an excellent resource along those lines:

http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Professional-Development-Teachers-Mathematics/dp/1412974143/

Instead of one-time PDs, the experiences for learning the inquiry science teaching model are built into our teacher education program and scaffolded over time. At the beginning of the program we intentionally engage our teachers in an open-ended scientific investigation where they have to come up with their own research question, the methods for hypothesis testing, and ultimately the production and defense of knowledge claims based on their work. In this process both the research question and the answer are unknown. The students are responsible for determining their question of interest.

I teach this first class. Yes, I do cede authority in the creation of the question to the students. It’s uncomfortable, as that’s largely not how I was taught myself. And while it sounds squishy, I have to have faith in their ability to run with the messiness. And I know that each student/group will take ownership differently. And I scaffold along the way depending on the needs of the class (mainly by introducing tools or technology at specific times, but also by withholding information other times, and frequently by engaging them in metacognitive stops – making sense of what they’re doing and what they know at a point in time). Again, flexible depending on the cultural needs until they don’t really need me anymore and I recede into more of a facilitation stance as the course progresses.

And yes, it’s amazing how effective that is. Seeing students move from a stance of knowledge consumption to knowledge production, and the liberation that happens when they take ownership over problem solving is something that has been so powerful that I will never go back to a more “traditional” teacher-centered classroom model. And I’ve said this before, but it’s not all or nothing here either. The teacher has a role in facilitating these experiences.

If you want to read more about the philosophy and pedagogy of our program, I recommend this piece from one of my mentors, April Luehmann:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.20209/abstract

I’d love to know what you make of it. Incidentally, this will be out soon as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Blogging-Change-Transforming-Education-Literacies/dp/1433105594

April’s work is fantastic and largely the reason that I found your blog in the first place. We’re trying to also understand teacher PD via the social processes of blogging, but that’s another time.

Anyway, it’s getting late and I need to go to bed. I’ll leave with this for now.

Instead of constantly trying to sell knives, I simply ask you to think about what the students might try to sell to you? And how can we, as teachers, draw that out in a way that makes the learning more authentic, engaging, meaningful, etc.?

Dan, I deeply, deeply respect the work you’re doing here, which is why I want to push you. Again, I really hope I’m not coming across as condescending. Please tell me if I am.