October 2012 – Page 4

Month: October 2012

Total 18 Posts

Two Items On Flipped Learning

By Dan Meyer • October 3, 2012 • 27 Comments

[Flipping your classroom] carries a load of assumptions, including (minimally) the fact that students (1) have access, (2) will bother to watch it, and (3) have the skills to process and make meaning of what they’re watching (note-taking, summarizing, and the ability to ask good questions about what they don’t understand for starters). In my experience, these skills often need to be explicitly taught and scaffolded for students.

Brian Stockus:

What is with the insistence on the lecture (direct instruction) model? Teachers appear to be loving the ability to offer more engaging, open-ended activities in class now that students are watching lectures at home. What was stopping these teachers from offering these kinds of activities before? Why do teachers think students have to be told what to do before they actually do any math?

I’ll Be On Al Jazeera’s The Stream With Sal Khan Tomorrow

By Dan Meyer • October 1, 2012 • 7 Comments

I’ll be on Al Jazeera’s The Stream with Sal Khan tomorrow 10/2 at 3:30PM EDT as part of a segment on Khan Academy. You can watch live from their website if that’s what you’re into. I’ll update this post with the segment afterwards if that’s possible.

2012 Oct 3. Here’s a link to the entire broadcast. They give me two questions – one about the best use for those lecture videos in the classroom and the other comparing the Khan Academy model to math instruction in high-performing countries.

At first, Khan poses his lectures as a “first pass” or a “first scaffold” at new material. This is less effective and less engaging than a lecture posed in response to a precursor activity that sets students up to need that lecture and understand its context.

I pressed that angle in my second question and Khan then took a fairly agnostic approach to the instructional sequence. Basically, “do whatever works.”

Personalization is the point and Khan Academy has certainly figured out how personalize lecture delivery. But personalizing the precursor activity that sets students up to need those lectures is much, much harder. I didn’t get the sense from our exchange that that kind of personalization is anywhere on Khan Academy’s horizon.

[LOA] They Don’t Know Their Own Power

By Dan Meyer • October 1, 2012 • 14 Comments

I was at South Dakota State University last week and I asked some future math teachers to define the word “abstract” in a sentence. All of them defined it as an adjective, not a verb. They were more aware of “abstract” as something you are, not something you do.

A thought or idea that cannot be made tangible or concrete.
Abstract is something that is different, non mainstream, and requires higher level thinking.
Anything that is out of the ordinary or requires creative thought.
A concept or idea that is not easily or not able to be put into concrete or physical terms.
Beyond the logical ways of thinking about problems and ideas.
Not concrete. Imaginary. Out of the box thinking.

John Mason, in a great piece called “Mathematical Abstraction as the Result of a Delicate Shift of Attention“:

When the shift occurs, it is hardly noticeable and, to a mathematician, it seems the most natural and obvious movement imaginable. Consequently it fails to attract the expert’s attention. When the shift does not occur, it blocks progress and makes the student feel out of touch and excluded, a mere observer in a peculiar ritual.

If they don’t understand their own power, how will their students?

BTW: Also great. Frorer, et al:

… we rarely find [abstraction] explicitly discussed let alone defined. You can pick up a book entitled Abstract Algebra and not find a real discussion of abstraction as a process, or of abstractions as objects …

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Month: October 2012

Two Items On Flipped Learning

I’ll Be On Al Jazeera’s The Stream With Sal Khan Tomorrow

[LOA] They Don’t Know Their Own Power