My New Year’s Resolution: Fail More in 2015

Earlier this week I wrote out my goals for 2015. The original list had an even dozen. Now, there are 13.

Here’s the one I just added to the list: I want to fail more in 2015.

You see, 2014 was a great year. But in some respects—especially when things got busy—I played it safe. As my grading stacks piled higher, I took fewer risks. As my planning lists grew longer, I stepped out of my comfort zone less often. And this tendency away from risk in the busy seasons stifled my overall growth in 2014.

The year before (not-so-coincidentally, the year I joined Twitter and started blogging) I took more chances, tried more new things. To be sure, I struggled and failed in 2013. Often, in fact. But every time I fell, I fell forward. These struggles and failures proved to be wonderfully productive, particularly with respect to expanding and deepening my educational philosophy, and closing the gap between that and my classroom practice.

So here’s my recipe for a growth-filled 2015: I’m going to take more risks. I’m going to fail more often. I’m going to develop a habit of stepping out of my comfort zone. When I struggle, I’ll do it productively.

And through this risking-struggling-failing-growing, I’m going to have my best year yet.

November 3, 2014November 7, 2014

The script is dead. Long live the prompt!

Period 2

Well that wasn’t any good.

Here’s a picture of the main part of my Calculus lesson from today:

One example. That’s it. The central element of my entire lesson was… one example. And not even a task. Just an example. A watch-me-as-I-carefully-walk-through-every-step-of-this-sucker and make-sure-you’re-on-guard-in-case-I-ask-you-any-leading-questions example. Oh my.

Granted, there was more after that example, just not a great deal more. And none of it great. We actually wrapped up the example, started the “next thing,” and quickly abandoned ship after some “Show me on your fingers how you’re doing” feedback from students revealed that all was not well (not by a long shot).

This changing of gears led to a somewhat-useful last 10 minutes of class (thanks in part to Desmos), which in turn led me to wonder: What did the end of class have that the start of class was missing? For one thing, after seeing the first part flop I had to clarify in my mind the bottom line goal for the lesson. I settled on this: If students left my room with the ability to translate verbal and algebraic problem descriptions into graphs, and those graphs into integral expressions, we’d be golden.

Period 3

Well that wasn’t any good, either.

I went overboard Sunday evening creating a slide deck that (I thought) would help me lead students through a carefully crafted conversation on the topic of trigonometric properties and identities. The slide deck was slick as all get out. But the lesson was boring. You could see it on their little compliant faces. They didn’t even complain. They just sat there. Copying a property or two here, sketching a graph or two there, dutifully jotting down an observation or two when I asked, and so on, for the better part of half an hour. Argh!

Inspiration ≠ Incorporation

At this point I have no idea if I’ve painted a clear picture of what took place today in my classroom. Even less so what’s going on in my head right now. If you’re feeling uncomfortable, abandon ship now, ’cause this is about to get even less coherent.

You see, I’ve been struggling with a number of thoughts over the past few months. To name a few:

Sam Shah is awesome. As some teachers call out worksheets on Twitter, Sam is busy packing one aha-moment after another into carefully crafted mathematical adventures for his students, all on that oldie-but-goodie 8.5 by 11 format. I want to bring these kinds of things into my own classroom!
Dan Meyer is awesome. As some teachers give the all-call for real world applications over all else, Dan is blasting through pseudocontext and drawing attention to the heart of the matter (engagement), regardless of whether a task is labeled “real world” or “fake world.” I want to make genuine student engagement a central (and regular) feature of my teaching practice!
Karim Ani and Team Mathalicious are awesome. As some teachers are firing up Khan Academy accounts and printing off hundred-of-the-same worksheets from Google search results, Karim and the crew are laying siege to the notion that math is uninteresting, unengaging, unimportant, or unworthy of our attention. I want to bring Mathalicious-style conversations into my own lessons!
Jonathan Claydon is awesome. Seriously, have you seen the pictures of his class over at Infinite Sums? His students do stuff. All the time. They’re active, they’re involved. I don’t care what the lesson is, they’re at the heart of it. I want this to be true of my own students!

And I haven’t even mentioned Stadel, Nguyen, Kaplinsky, Vaudrey, Stevens… The list goes on. And while my inspiration grows, my frustration does too, because I can’t find a way to incorporate all of this awesome into a coherent whole in my own teaching world.

That’s really the issue. And I’m just using a frustrating Monday morning to process what I’ve been struggling with for months in the hope that I can make some sense of it all.

The Challenge

(Still with me? Awesome. Hang in there, we’re almost done.)

So let me try to name my struggle, clearly and succinctly, so I can go about the task of moving beyond it. Here goes:

For the past 500 days I’ve been inspired daily (literally, every single day) by what I see in the MTBoS. At the same time, I have yet to find a way to weave that inspiration into my own practice in a coherent, compatible way.

The Way Forward

I don’t know the entire solution, but I know it starts with this: I’m done designing scripted lessons, those awful handouts with eleven-teen examples that we’ll walk through. Together. All of us. At the same pace. (I’ve created enough of those to last a lifetime, and they don’t develop in students any of what I’m after.) I’m done drawing up anything where I can predict with 99%+ accuracy what the students will be thinking at any given point. I’m done throwing together slide decks that demand students focus on the same thing at the same time. I’m done throttling their insights, their noticings, and their wonderings by squeezing out of them a certain style of efficiency that is anything but effective.

Instead, I’ll be spending my time infusing worksheets with aha-moments and did-you-just-see-that mathematical surprises. I’ll be on the lookout for visuals that mess with students minds and spark dozens of questions they actually want to answer. And I’ll expand my teaching skillset so that I can navigate the waters of a class full of students exploring different problems inspired by the same visual. I’ll take risks, push the boundaries of what I’m currently capable of, and through it all develop my ability to orchestrate rich mathematical discussions, whether they’re centered around a thought-journey disguised as a worksheet, a rich and who-cares-if-it-has-no-context problem, an engaging and demanding task, or an honest-to-goodness real-world scenario. And whatever I do, I’ll make sure my students are at the center of it.

In short, I’m done with trying to script their thinking. I’m going all in with prompting them to think. “The script is dead. Long live the prompt!”

March 10, 2014March 28, 2014

Wasting a Day vs Wasting a Year

Today in Algebra 1 I tried a sorting activity designed—in theory, that is—to strengthen student understanding of the vocabulary involved and the methods used in solving quadratics by factoring and by completing the square. We’ve been struggling with this lately, so I thought I would try another tack.

It didn’t go so well, so I feel like I wasted the day. And you know what? I’m okay with that.

Because after a year of tweeting and blogging and interacting with teachers a thousand times better than I am, I have a vision of what my classroom could be like, and (1) it doesn’t look the same as what I’ve been doing and (2) it’s worth pursuing.

What concerns me far more than wasting a day is not trying new things, not experimenting, not seeking opportunities to grow, and instead sticking with my status quo and through that static and stunted approach ending up wasting an entire year.

So I’ll keep tinkering, I’ll continue trying things that may fail. And sometimes I’ll feel like I lost a day (like today). But at the end of the year, we’ll have something better than if I had played it safe all along.

Oh, and next year… pick up where I left off, and I’ll keep tinkering and trying and failing and improving and building. And I think my students and I will be far better off in the long run.

Excuse me while I head off to redesign something.

August 12, 2013

A New Kind of First Day

Today marked the first day of the 2013-2014 school year for me. It was, all in all, a wonderful day. Teaching at a relatively small K-12 school, I have an opportunity to work with some students for two, three, or even four years in their 7-12 grade experience. Seeing students who I’ve come to know so well over the past few years walk through my classroom door on the first day of the new year is a tremendous blessing, and it’s always fun to see how they have matured over the summer months in their transition from 7th to 8th, middle school to high school, or maybe even junior year to senior year.

The Highlight

I won’t bore you with the details, but the highlight of my day came in watching my AP Calculus AB roster (which appeared to have only 6 students when I checked online late last week) grow to 11 students by the end of the school day on Monday. This included three unexpected, last-minute additions, and I’m thrilled to have these students join our small but amazing group. (For reference, I typically have 10 to 15 students in Calculus, and our graduating class has been around 50 students in recent years.) I’m excited and honored that these students (all 11, really) have decided to challenge themselves with another year of math, and have even sacrificed other classes they were interested in to make it possible. Plus I think we’ll have a blast this year.

The Struggle Continues, Intensifies

Despite all the good vibes, I struggled through some parts of today. I’ve worked relentlessly over the past nine years to create as strong a math program as I could imagine at the school. If my today-self could time travel (with a USB flash drive or a link to a Dropbox folder) to meet, say, my 2006-self, that older version might think something along the lines of, “Wow! Most of what I’ve imagined for the math department is a reality. That’s super swell.”

Here’s the problem, though, and I have many of you to blame for it: The ceiling on what I can imagine has been blown off, and I’m now confronted (in the middle of nearly every class) by a dozen or so notions of how the lesson I’m smack-dab in the middle of could be improved, become less terrible, etc. These thoughts don’t even allow me the grace of finishing an example or an activity; they jump right to the front of my brain even as I’m presenting/discussing/guiding.

So after a few months of relatively stress-free hanging out in the MTBoS, I see the tension between what I believe should happen in the classroom and what I’m currently doing (the struggle between my philosophy and my practice) not only resuming, but (rapidly) intensifying.

Determined to Grow

While the MTBoS is largely to blame for this increased tension, it’s also likely to provide the inspiration for much of the personal growth I’ll experience in the coming months. It may be exceptionally frustrating at times, but I’m determined to make this struggle (my first full year of MTBoS-fueled, classroom-based struggling) exceedingly productive.