We had great discussions today about different situations where objects are accelerating. They were deep and interesting and in each class, students brought up some great ideas.
I took no pictures, though. I feel like a #teach180 rookie.
So, instead, I'm going to focus on how hard it is to be wrong. Students don't want to put up wrong answers. I had a student today who told me he was worried that other students would judge him for not understanding the material. I talk about how important it is to discuss different ideas. I train students to ask questions rather than just point out flaws.
But I feel like I'm still caught up in the right/wrong paradigm. I don't think I'm pushing the conversation from answer-finding (which is all about right and wrong) to meaning-making (which is all about clarity/connections and confusion/disconnections). I need to work on communicating that to students. Instead of, "what do you like or not like about these boards?" (which is my go-to question about whiteboards and is way too vague), I'm going to try other approaches. My ideas so far:
- What connections between the ideas on the board to you see? (Like, how do the position-time and the velocity-time graphs relate?)
- What connections do you see between this problem and the problem where...?
- What makes the most sense to you on this board?
- What did you learn by doing this question? (Or what did you learn from the discussion of this question?)
I'm still thinking about this.