tl;dr – It’s the camera. And using it thoughtfully can change your teaching in substantial ways.

I spent most of the fall in eighth grade classrooms, watching lots of teachers enact the same set of Desmos lessons in different ways and in different contexts and with different results.

Some classes were high energy, some were low energy.

Some classes seemed to learn a lot, others learned less.

There are lots of important explanations for those differences, of course, many of which have nothing to do with the teachers or students themselves. But it was also interesting to sit in some high energy, high learning classes and palpably feel that these teachers are really, really curious about their students. Curious about them personally, sure, but curious about their thinking in particular.

Students feel that curiosity — “My teacher wants to know what I’m thinking about.” — and I find it easy to attribute some significant amount of those classes’ high energy and high learning to that feeling.

Teachers expressed that curiosity using the snapshotting tool when students recorded their thinking in Desmos. When students recorded their thinking on paper, teachers expressed their curiosity with their cameraphones, taking photos of student work and projecting them up on the board.

You see this on Twitter all the time! Curious teachers share diverse student thinking with other curious teachers.

Making students scratch their heads with our notice and wonder today. It sparked some great conversations! #exceptional #iteachmath pic.twitter.com/uOkcta4ASm

— Teri Beth Shearer (@tbethshearer) January 11, 2019

And that practice creates no fewer than twelve virtuous cycles, a few of which I can quickly describe:

1. When teachers express curiosity about diverse student thinking, students feel that and feel license to express even more diverse kinds of thinking.
2. The more perspectives on an idea a teacher can help students connect, the more students learn about that idea.
3. That all feels great so the teacher becomes more curious about student thinking and consequently re-evaluates her curriculum and instruction to emphasize tasks and pedagogy that are more likely to elicit diverse thinking.
4. The teacher becomes interested in learning more mathematics because the more math you know, the more you’re able to identify and connect diverse student thinking when you see it.

Run that cycle for a few months and you have a different class.

Run that cycle for a few years and you have a different teacher.

Run that cycle across a department and you have a different school.

It starts with your cameraphone.

BTW. If your students’ diverse thinking currently fills you with more anxiety than curiosity, I encourage you “act your way into belief” instead of the reverse. Take two minutes at the end of class to share “My Favorite Whoa,” a photo of student thinking during the day you thought was so interesting and why you thought it was interesting. That’s low commitment with a lot of upside.

BTW. If you already use your cameraphone to express curiosity about student thinking, head to the comments and let us know how you do that. Your colleagues want to know your workflow.

Featured Comments

Daniel Peter uses whiteboards:

Need to be able to put up multiple solutions at the same time so the teacher can use questions to help students create explicit connects between the solutions: similarities/differences, aha (unique, elegant, just plain interesting) and help students make connects to the underlying properties, principles of mathematics. The advantage of paper/vertical whiteboards (or old school individual slates) is I can create the congress or bansho to make those connections explicit through the organization.

Several people use Reflector. Here’s Gretchen Muller:

It turns my phone into a portable document camera. Multiple devices can be shown at a time so I can do compare and contrast between different pieces of work at the same time. I now use it in my work with educators. The first question I always get is “How did you do that?”. I use it both as a live camera so that students can explain from their desk or still pictures from my phone and iPad when I want to compare.

Allison Krasnow describes students using their cameraphones to take pictures of student work:

I received three texts (I use remind.com) this evening with students sending photos of their homework showing where they got confused and asking for help. Them texting me photos of their homework when they are stuck and at home with no one to help them is incredibly powerful.

Let me describe a powerful teaching tool we just released and the company values that compelled us to build it.

First, let’s acknowledge that statements of values are often useless. Values are only useful if they help people make hard decisions. Our company values should (a) help educators decide how we’re different from other math edtech companies, (b) help us decide how to spend our limited time in the world. So here is one of our values:

We believe that math class should be social and creative — that students should create mathematics in every form and then share those creations with each other and their teachers.

Many other companies disagree with those values, or at least they spend their limited time in the world acting on different ones. For example, many other companies think it’s sufficient for students to create multiple choice and numerical responses to express their mathematical thinking and to share those responses with a grading algorithm alone.

Our values conflict, and the result is that other companies spend their time optimizing adaptive grading algorithms while we spend our time thinking about ways to provoke mathematical creativity that algorithms can’t grade at all. We may both work in “math edtech” but we are on very different paths, and our path recently led us to a very thorny question:

What should teachers do with all these expressions of mathematical creativity that algorithms can’t grade?

Let’s say we ask students an interesting question about mathematics or we ask them to define a relationship and sketch its graph. That’s good math, but the teacher now has dozens of written answers and sketches that their computers can’t grade.

Other math edtech software offers teachers scarce insight into the ways students think mathematically. We offer teachers abundant insight which is a different kind of problem, and just as serious. We’ve spent months building a solution to this problem of abundance and we likely would have spent years if not for one book:

Mary Kay Stein and Margaret Smith’s Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions.

Smith and Stein describe five teaching practices that promote student learning through summary discussions. Teachers should (1) anticipate ideas students will produce during a task or activity and then (2) monitor student work during class for those ideas and others that weren’t anticipated. Then the teacher should (3) select a subset of those interesting student ideas, (4) sequence the order of their presentation, and then help students (5) connect them.

In our classroom observations of our activities, we noticed teachers struggling to select student ideas because there were so many of them streaming from the students’ heads into the teacher’s dashboard. Sometimes teachers would make a note about an idea they wanted to select later, but when “later” came around, the student had already developed the idea further. So then we saw teachers take screenshots of that idea and paste them into slide software for sequencing. Smith and Stein’s recommendations are already ambitious and our software was not making it easier for teachers to enact them.

So we built “Snapshots.”

If you see interesting ideas at any time during an activity, press the camera icon next to it.

Then go to the “Snapshots” tab.

Sequence the ideas by dragging them into a collection.

Add a comment or a question to help students connect their classmates’ ideas to the main ideas of the lesson.

Then press “Present.”

We tested the tool ourselves during a summer school session in Berkeley, CA, and also with teachers around the country. What we’ve noticed is that students pay much more attention to discussions when the discussion isn’t about a page from the textbook or a worked example from the teacher but about ideas from the students themselves.

It’s the difference between “Let me tell you about a really useful strategy for multiplying two-digit number” and “Let me show you some useful strategies from around the class for multiplying two-digit numbers. They’re all correct. Decide which seems like less work to you.”

Here are some of our other favorite uses from the last month of testing.

Values help us all decide how to spend our limited time in the world, and nobody feels those limits quite like classroom teachers. Teachers frequently, and with good cause, evaluate new ideas and innovations by asking, “Does my class have time for this? What will we have to skip if we do this?”

Your decision to spend your limited class time talking about your ideas, your textbook’s ideas, or your students’ ideas is a loud expression of your values. Students hear it. We hope your students hear how much you value their mathematical creativity, explicitly in your words and implicitly in how you spend your time. You bring those values. We’ll keep working on tools to help you live them out in your classroom every day.

2018 Jun 16: We will close this particular posting Saturday, June 23, 11:59PM Pacific.

My team at Desmos is hiring!

You should share that link with anyone who might be a good fit for the work. Alternately, if you think you’re a good fit for the work, you should guard that posting with your life, share it with nobody, and start thinking about your cover letter.

Why you should apply is really simple:

Desmos is the best place to do great work in math edtech right now and for the foreseeable future.

Here are six reasons I’m pulling out of muscle memory. I’m not even thinking about them. Ask me in ten minutes and I’ll give you six more just as fast.

• Teachers and students love our work. Check our Twitter feed. Also we just wrapped up a pilot study of 44 teachers using our activities and the results exceeded all of our expectations.
• Desmos folk are enormously talented in their own areas, curious and humble in all the others. So while my team didn’t come to Desmos having studied the same fields as our software developers and product designers (or vice versa) we’re conversationally fluent in each other’s work and humble about the limitations of that fluency. That disposition results in extremely enjoyable and productive collaboration.
• Great work-life balance. Startups are notoriously unfriendly to families but all of the full-time folk on my team have a couple of kids or more. Each one will tell you they love Desmos’s flexibility to do their best work at negotiable hours and locations.
• Everyone at Desmos is really satisfied with how we handle meetings and remote work, according to an internal company survey earlier this month. That’s uncommon.
• Strong financial position. While other edtech companies take on as much venture capital as they can, mortgaging their ability to make important decisions for themselves, Desmos has worked hard to minimize its reliance on outside investment. The result is that my team has had time and freedom to make decisions, first, based on what works for math students and, second, based on what we can sell. (Example: we decided to invest heavily in making our graphing calculator accessible to vision-impaired students because we thought that reducing an impediment to mathematical thinking sounded like a really good idea. Afterwards, we turned that work into contracts with eighteen states with more on the way.)
• Glassdoor reviews that speak for themselves.

We’ve spent several years tuning up our model for math, education, and technology. We studied it over the last three months and various aspects have clicked right into place. Demand is heating up for that work so we’re looking for people to help us build.

So please check out the posting and think about applying or sending it to someone you know.

BTW. If the formatting of the job posting seems atypical, it’s because we spent a lot of time discussing Lever’s blog series on reducing hiring bias. It would be easy to write a list of required credentials based on our mental profile of an ideal candidate. But that mental profile would be extremely susceptible to implicit and explicit biases. Lever received more responses from a more diverse group of candidates when they focused less on their credentials and more on what they’d need to know for the work and what they’d do at different milestones in their first year.

For example, an earlier draft of our posting required “at least five years of teaching experience at grades 6-12,” which isn’t bad as far as credentials go, but we realized it’s really just a proxy for the first four bullets beneath “What you should show up ready to teach anyone on your first day.”

• What a day in the life of a public middle- or high-school teacher looks like in the United States.
• The major challenges of technology integration in US classrooms from the perspective of both students and teachers.
• What separates a great math lesson from a lousy math lesson.
• What separates great classroom technology from lousy classroom technology.

We’re grateful to Lever for opening up their hiring practices to the public.