Dan Meyer

If I Taught: Social Studies

By Dan Meyer • April 7, 2009 • 22 Comments

I’d have my students reverse engineer banknotes and license plates:

I’d rip ’em from Banknotes or Plateshack or wherever. And then I’d get comfortable with Photoshop’s clone stamp, removing identifying details by any means necessary.

And then I’d serve them up plain …

… and ask the students to:

determine the elements that comprised the banknote or license plate (and, in the case, of banknotes, there are usually a lot of elements – historical figures, state birds, even the color scheme matters)
speculate on what country/state the banknote/plate belongs to.
explain each element in the context of its country/state.

I’m just armchair quarterbacking here, though.

What We Want Isn’t Out There

By Dan Meyer • April 7, 2009 • 4 Comments

Todd Seal, the best ELA blogger you don’t subscribe to, responds to Scott McLeod’s recent provocation (paraphrased), “Can you identify 10 excellent web sites for your grade / subject area, and if not what’s wrong with you?”

Todd: What we want isn’t out there. My typical search finds me cobbling lots of different pieces together with an idea I’ve had for the last two years along with a little something I got from watching SNL this weekend attached to the core of an idea I got from a discussion with some friends last month. I rarely find resources online that fit right into what I’m doing or that hit on what I want to address. I wish they were out there, but not even Discovery Education or any of the lesson plan warehouse sites cut it. Lots of chaff to sort through there and I worry about my return on time invested.

If I had to compile a list of sites essential to my day-to-day practice, you’d find Google Search, Google Reader, Google Images, and not a whole heckuva lot else. I spend much of my planning time lately curating media of the kind Todd lists in his awesome run-on sentence there: TV shows, photos I find, photos I take, video I capture, iPhone applications, current events, commercials, and, if I must, my assigned textbook.

I curate this media. I arrange it sensibly and structure questions and activities around it. It’s time-consuming and it’s challenging and the only way I can remotely justify the expense is by posting those lesson packs here, for others to download, deploy, and improve upon, thereby propping up an initially weak return on my investment.

As magical as these Internets are, I haven’t been able to outsource that curation to one website, or ten.

Global Math Geeks

By Dan Meyer • April 7, 2009 • Comments Off

Darren Draper takes on What Can You Do With This? as a professional development exercise in TechLearning:

I think we’d do well as educators to consider this and similarly engaging forms of online learning to challenge teachers in their pursuit of up-to-the-minute professional development. Our teachers need to be challenged, and not just by the kids. By engaging in a little self-directed, peer-provided rigor, I think that instructional practices can improve.

Obviously, I agree. I’m also sure this is nowhere near the best we can do.

Are You A Sucker For Product Placement?

By Dan Meyer • April 6, 2009 • 4 Comments

Watch this YouTube video, which is sweet and wistful all the way up until you realize it’s selling flavored sugar water:

The question I asked my students was, “when did you realize it was selling you Coke?” and “how many times did you see Coke throughout?”

The kids who are unfortunate sponges for product placement didn’t notice it was a Coke ad until the end. Savvier shoppers spotted the Coke billboard halfway through.

These classroom conversations are fun and useful and I’m glad we make room for them in math. I have given up posting my show and tell media here but if you’d like a feed of photos and video I show in my classes every day, I have tagged them here.

Weightlifter / Spotter

By Dan Meyer • April 6, 2009 • 13 Comments

The good teacher knows if the learner learns through the ears, the eyes, or the hands just like the good spotter knows where the lifter wants support – at the wrists or under the elbows or on the bar. The good spotter is unhelpful; the good spotter doesn’t intervene at the first sign of struggle but realizes that the struggle is essential, that the struggle is the entire reason they are there, and waits as long as possible before intervening.

The good teacher puts weight on the student’s intellectual bar and lets her struggle under that weight as long as possible, asking questions to help her cut through the confusion, just like the spotter shouts encouragement at the lifter.

Mostly I envy the spotter. The job is so (comparatively) easy. The spotter steps in just as the lifter begins to collapse and not a moment before. That moment is nowhere near as obvious in teaching where what the learner says she needs and what the learner actually needs often are not the same thing, where it isn’t visually obvious that the learner is too perplexed or not perplexed enough.

And, my word: we’re spotting thirty people at once.

[Photo credit]

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