Dan Meyer

Total 1628 Posts

I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

Why Reduced Class Size Is A Joke

By Dan Meyer • November 4, 2008 • 34 Comments

or: Finally Understanding The Appeal Of These Student Response Systems

Aaron Pallas (nee Skoolboy) has been skeptical of the impact of reduced class size on student achievement for some time. This never made sense to me until last week.

I’m observing other classes on my prep period. It started out once a week, reluctantly. Now I’m in a new class every prep – half hour at a time – and really enjoying the experience. My note-taking has evolved as I’ve noticed trends and I have customized an observation form. I take photos and record audio (on my iPhone, natch) and keep all the media in GoogleDocs.

After I observe every class at my school, I’ll inevitably work all of my field notes into some kind of comprehensive post-mortem (the results are too interesting to simply file in a drawer and forget) but I have to point something out right now.

Part of my observation involves a dot plot of teacher position over the first thirty minutes of class. With two exceptions (so far) they all look like this:

The sage on the stage is real, though she’s far more stage than sage. She’s tethered. She doesn’t leave the board. She doesn’t deviate from a tight route she’s defined between her teacher desk and the overhead projector.

She puts five problems up on an opener and models three separate skills in a lecture without once venturing out and examining student work. Not only does this construct an artificial wall between teacher and student but it makes checking for understanding very difficult.

What I’m saying is that reduced class size is useless if you’re still going to teach like you’re a lecturer in some intro course at some enormous public university.

And now enter student response systems, technology which enables this detachment, which tells teachers which students picked the right answer and which picked the wrong answer as formulated by the teacher but not which students picked the wrong answer as formulated by the student.

Get a wireless remote. Project a problem, something meaty with a lot of steps and maybe a couple of twists somewhere near the end, and then walk around – through the rows, not just around the periphery – noting common errors. Have a conversation with your students.

Because none of this intervention – I don’t think –Â makes any difference if you haven’t already asked your students, “How are you doing today?” But I dunno. Maybe just let them select the answer to that question with their student response systems.

BTW: Here’s my observation form.

Wherever You Can Find It

By Dan Meyer • October 30, 2008 • 33 Comments

I woke up with a scorching sore throat and called in a reliever. I’m at a coffee shop right now, putting down some echinacea tea but, sore throat or not, I needed a personal day. It’s been a rough few weeks, light on blogging, which, if you’ll recall, is as good a sign as any that my job satisfaction is tanking, that someone needs to send a St. Bernard up the mountain after me.

In the middle of all this, Ian Garrovillas got a T.A., a class tutor, and a new lease on his career. Also, Jen, a first-year English teacher somewhere in the Los Angeles Unified wrote:

I don’t normally post on good days, so I just wanted to take a moment to say that today went pretty well. This isn’t to say today was smooth — crying girls, a special ed kid going off the wall, and a surprise admin observation were just part of the fun — but it was functional, kids understood the lesson, some real punkasses did a bit of classwork for a change, and we even had some laughs. Maybe there’s hope for this year, and this career, yet.

And I’m encouraged by these newcomers. I still wonder, though, exactly how low I have to set my standard before I can qualify days as “good” or, especially, “sustainable.” Reasonably how low, I mean.

What Can You Do With This: Schrute Bucks

By Dan Meyer • October 21, 2008 • 35 Comments

Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

[I set off a hydrogen bomb on my blog with that last WCYDWT (since redacted, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t sweat it). Everything from a lousy audio transcode to Vimeo shutting down my account for violating its TOS. Sorry for the confusion.]

BTW: Let’s give it to Dan:

I thought it really demonstrated a more common error of classroom management: rewards are determined by the receiver, not the giver. Some punishments will be rewards to certain students and vice versa.

My Shortest-Ever Post On Presentation

By Dan Meyer • October 19, 2008 • 16 Comments

The conversation in my ILC recap has taken a few predictable turns, namely the one where I expect too much of presentations, that I need to lighten up on the presenters. I don’t know how to relax my standards or if that’s even a good idea. I do know how to distill everything I have ever enjoyed about any presentation into two steps. I don’t care what your presentation covers; if you manage these, I will love it.

Unless your presentation is billed as “beginner-level” don’t include information I can easily Google. What I mean is, while I know nothing about Photo Story, it was painful spending seat-time on a tutorial for adding narration to Photo Story, which is Google’s top result for the same query. I can get that anytimeThis was the most dissonant element of ILC. Half the presenters told me not to tell my kids stuff their steroidal smart phones could tell them. The other half were doing the opposite..
Instead, cover the stuff I can’t Google, that stuff that makes your presence worth my district’s money and my time. Here’s an easy outline: a) why Photo Story; what problem were you trying to solve? should I care about that problem? b) what complications did you encounter while implementing Photo Story? how did you overcome them? c) what did you learn?

This particular outline forces you to reckon with audience expectations and puts you in a position to satisfy them. It would have improved fourteen of the eighteen presentationsNone of which were about Photo Story, okay? I attended at ILCThough this outline is useless if you turn your back to the audience and read aloud from a slide titled “What I Learned.”.

ILC 2008

By Dan Meyer • October 17, 2008 • 42 Comments

or: My First Ed-Tech Conference
also: My Last Ed-Tech Conference

I’m back now from the Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose, CA. When I first bumped into Alice Mercer, she said, “This doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.” She’s either right, and I’m just the wrong person for ILC, or else ILC should have stepped its game up in a lot of ways. Obviously, I’m biased toward the latter. Either way, I shouldn’t have missed class time for this.

Therefore, a brief preface of ILC’s good stuff and then my best advice for the presenters there. If you’re reading this and you presented at ILC, obviously I’m not talking about you, or your session, etc., and hopefully you all realize by now that I reserve my harshest criticism for myself.

Preface

It was nice meeting Collette, Rushton, Alice, Gail, and some other folks; CUE organized the conference well, with the right number of sessions per day (five) at the right length (an hour, though some presenters didn’t earn ten minutes); the catered lunch was fine, just fine.

That Said

In order to earn one seat-hour from a few dozen people, your presentation needs either:

a compelling personality behind it;
expertise, the sort of expertise DFW wrote about, the kind that has such a tight conceptual grasp, it can explain itself from any side, from any angle, from a macro- or microscopic lens;
a compelling narrative, something with an antagonist, with obstacles to overcome, even if they’re just stubborn network administrators; this is why I pinned my talk on math methods (back in the day) to a fictional student and gave her a photo;
illustrative, complementary visuals; video, PowerPoint, handouts, makes no difference to me so long as they’re pretty and useful;
empathy for audience expectations, the sort of clairvoyance where you know what your audience is wondering, what it’s waiting to see.

Fourteen of eighteen presentations I attended couldn’t manage one of those.

There was the usual PowerPoint plague, presenters standing for thirteen minutes stock-still in front of a bulleted slide, that flat text often describing a highly visual conceptThere is no excuse for describing student video production with text bullets. Show video!, those bullet points often disregarding basic mechanical Englishie. If you’re going to shame yourself with bullet points, they should read (eg.) “Noun; Noun; Noun; Noun” not (eg.) “Noun; Noun; Noun; Past-Tense Verb.”.

As a guy who teaches compulsory Algebra to kids who have hated Algebra, I don’t see how fourteen presenters managed to blow a scenario where an audience volunteered to attend their sessions. Where the audience is interested in the session (provided the presenter didn’t falsely bill it). Where the audience is pulling for the presenter. Where the audience is eager to be dazzled, fed, or inspired.

ILC was like walking into eighteen car dealerships, pockets bulging with cash, declaring to every salesperson, “I’m here to buy,” and discovering that fourteen of them couldn’t close the sale.

Equivocations

I don’t mean to be overly particular but what I saw this weekend was visual- and verbal illiteracy at a high level. I saw fourteen educated professionals put styrofoam on a plate, convinced it was steak. I want no part in that sorry transaction. I want to produce and consume the best I can while I still can.

I’m speaking at CMC-North in Monterey this December on how not to ruin entire classes with visual illiteracy. I realize it’ll serve me right to have some punk kid out there in the audience, snarking about me on his blog and on Twitter.

All I can do is hold myself to this same standard.

Promoting Quality

If you’re cool with some profanity and if you’re even a little invested in the state of online gaming, check out this presentation from NY Tech Meet-Up. It did more to inspire, educate, and illustrate in five minutes and change than did the median presentation at ILC 2008.

NY Tech Meetup Presentation from Charles Forman on Vimeo.

Subscribe