February 2018 – dy/dan

Larry Berger, CEO of Amplify, offers a fantastic distillation of the promises of digital personalized learning and how they are undone by the reality of learning:

We also don’t have the assessments to place kids with any precision on the map. The existing measures are not high enough resolution to detect the thing that a kid should learn tomorrow. Our current precision would be like Google Maps trying to steer you home tonight using a GPS system that knows only that your location correlates highly with either Maryland or Virginia.

If you’re anywhere adjacent to digital personalized learning —Â working at an edtech company, teaching in a personalized learning school, in a romantic relationship with anyone in those two categories —Â you should read this piece.

Berger closes with an excellent question to guide the next generation of personalized learning:

What did your best teachers and coaches do for you–without the benefit of maps, algorithms, or data–to personalize your learning?

My best teachers knew what I knew. They understood what I understood about whatever I was learning in a way that algorithms in 2018 cannot touch. And they used their knowledge not to suggest the next “learning object” in a sequence but to challenge me in whatever I was learning then.

“Okay you think you know this pretty well. Let me ask you this.”

What’s your answer to Berger’s question?

BTW. It’s always the right time to quote Begle’s Second Law:

Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.

Featured Comment

SueH:

I have come to believe that all learning is personalized not because of what the teacher does but because of what’s happening inside the learner’s brain. Whatever pedagogical choices a teacher makes, it’s the student’s work that causes new neural networks to be created and pre-existing ones to be augmented or strengthened or broken or pruned.

Scott Farrand:

I’ll accept the risk of stating the obvious: my best teachers cared about me, and I felt that. Teaching is an act of love. A teacher who cares about each student is much more likely to, in that instant after a student responds to a question, find the positive value in the response and communicate encouragement to the student, verbally and nonverbally. And students who feel cared for are more likely to have good things going on in their brains, as described by SueH.

I’m absolute junk in the kitchen but I’m trying to improve. I marvel at the folks who go off recipe, creating delicious dishes by sight and feel. That’s not me right now. But I’m also not content simply to chop vegetables for somebody else.

I love the processes in the middle —Â like seasoning and sautÃ©ing. I can use that process in lots of different recipes, extending it in lots of different ways. It’s the right level of technical challenge for me right now.

In the same way, I’m enamored lately of instructional routines. These routines are sized somewhere between the routine administrative work of taking attendance and the non-routine instructional work of facilitating an investigation or novel problem. Just like seasoning and sautÃ©ing, they’re broadly useful techniques, so every minute I spend learning them is a minute very well spent.

For example, Estimation 180 is an instructional routine that helps students develop their number sense in the world. Contemplate then Calculate helps students understand the structure of a pattern before calculating its quantities. Which One Doesn’t Belong helps students understand how to name and argue about the names of mathematical objects.

(Aside: it’s been one of greatest professional pleasures of my life to watch so many of these routines begin and develop online, in our weirdo tweeting and blogging communities, before leaping to more mainstream practice.)

I first encountered the routine “Two Truths and a Lie” in college when new, nervous freshmen would share two truths about themselves and one lie, and other freshmen would try to guess the lie.

Marian Small and Amy Lin adapted that icebreaker into an instructional routine in their book More Good Questions. I heard about it from Jon Orr and yesterday we adapted that routine into our Challenge Creator technology at Desmos.

We invite each student to create their own object —Â a circle graph design in primary; a parabola in secondary.

We ask the student to write three statements about their object — two that are true, and one that is a lie. They describe why it’s a lie.

Here are three interesting statements from David Petro’s circle graph design. Which is the lie?

The shaded part is the same area as the non shaded part.
If these were pizzas, there is a way for three people to get the same amount when divided.
If you double the image you could make a total of 5 shaded circles.

And three from Sharee Herbert’s interesting parabola. Which is the lie?

The axis of symmetry is y=-2.
The y-intercept is negative.
The roots are real.

Then we put that thinking in a box, tie a bow around it, and slide it into your class gallery.

The teacher encourages the students to use the rest of their time to check out their classmates’ parabolas and circle graphs, separate lies from truth, and see if everybody agrees.

Our experience with Challenge Creator is that the class gets noisy, that students react to one another’s challenges verbally, starting and settling mathematical arguments at will. It’s beautiful.

So feel free to create a class and use these with your own students:

2018 Feb 6. I added eight more Two Truths & a Lie activities on suggestions from y’all!

BTW. Unfortunately, Challenge Creator doesn’t have enough polish for us to release it publicly yet. But I’d be happy to make a few more TTL activities if y’all wanted to propose some in the comments.

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Month: February 2018

Must Read: Larry Berger’s Confession & Question About Personalized Learning

Desmos + Two Truths and a Lie