Is work in classrooms ever really limited to one medium?

I’d argue “yeah.” When a student receives a task on paper – either a handout or a page out of a textbook – its author has likely tried to fully contain it on that paper. It’s no longer up for any kind of negotiation. You can’t ask the student to think about the information that’d be necessary for completing the task because the information is already on the paper. Etc.

Dan:Tentative hypothesis: it’s very difficult to work on the ladder of abstraction if your tasks are limited to one medium.

Is work in classrooms ever really limited to one medium? I would concur that only one medium may be *valued* in a classroom or other teaching and learning setting. But even when everything takes place in an iBook setting, for instance, people are making notes on scrap paper.

And to your point, Dan, those notes on scrap paper need to be part of the lesson. They often represent important, student-generated rungs on the ladder. The relationship is a bit of a chicken-and-egg one, I suppose. Do we start with more forms of media and highlight more rungs on the ladder as a result, or do we start by valuing those rungs, and the media become necessary consequences of that decision?

As for the white shoes, all teachers and students in Japan and Korea change into indoor shoes when they arrive at school (similar to taking off ones shoes when entering someone’s home). He would have had his dress shoes on when he left home and commuted to work.

Regarding the idea of lesson banks etc – it sounds wonderful in theory, but I haven’t yet made it work in practice. I keep and freely share all my lesson plans with my colleagues, but when we attempt to use each other’s it’s just too hard to figure out what the other person intended, the detail of it all. I tried using betterlesson, but that didn’t work either. What HAS worked is to find and adapt specific activities, rather than complete lessons, that other teachers have come up with. I find that galore on the internet, especially on all the math blogs out there. In fact there is too much, too many choices! Sometimes it seems more work to try to choose among a dozen great ideas and I end up just designing something from scratch instead.

@John, the student was making a graph of #pens vs #pencils and did not appear to have a plan for approaching the original question. The only way that I can see to use the students graph would be to pursue the usual intersection method to solving a system — way too much to take on at this point. Instead, the teacher drew in the bars to make it clear that the graph was just a more complicated way of showing that we have 10 writing utensils and got on with the lesson.

@Pat, I feel like I am remaking a perfectly mediocre wheel most of the time. It is very tough to do this when you have no one to critique and you have to wait a year to try again.

@Brian, I think a lot of the problems you speak of are do to the much more varied opinions in the US on what a good lesson looks like.

Even within my last school district there was little sharing and communication between schools. All the fourth grade teachers might get together over the summer at a math professional development workshop, but during the year we hardly spoke, nor were we given time to collaborate or share lesson plans/ideas.

Granted, putting together a bank of quality lessons won’t necessarily mean it gets used. Teachers would still need the time to browse the bank, watch the videos, judge the quality of what they’re seeing, and make adjustments as needed for their particular group of students. You would also have to build trust in the lessons. From my experience, teachers are often mistrusting of outside resources especially if the district is pushing the teachers to use them. Despite best intentions, things like this can backfire because teachers feel their professional judgment is being called into question.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the idea. I would have loved a bank from which to pull great Texas history lessons when I taught fourth grade! I just know that it’s a complicated issue, sadly.

As for the topic of titling the lesson, I think it comes down to knowing your class. I agree that having students title the lesson at the end is a great way to check their ability to summarize their learning. It’s easier said than done, and it likely takes practice for the students to get good at it.

But I will agree that some students may benefit from giving a title at the start of the lesson. It’s not like “From Tables to Expressions” encapsulates the entire lesson and ruins it for the students in any way. Rather it can give organization to the lesson that a teacher can use to keep the students focused on the goals of the lesson.

Think about the fact that he points out the answer to the first problem just a few minutes into the lesson, but he continues to talk about making the whole table. At times when I want to focus on the process I have given away the answer almost immediately so that the students can focus on how to arrive at the answer. It annoys the kids who want to solve it fast and raise their hand ready to shout out the answer, but it helps students realize that the answer isn’t all that matters.

Giving away the title or the answer doesn’t necessarily take away from the learning, it just necessitates a different kind of discourse in the classroom. And again, it depends on your students. You need to base all of these decisions around them, their abilities, and their needs.