How do you bungee? A PD Session from last year.

What are labels good for, anyway?

This has been a wondering of mine for quite a while.

I think I had a vague feeling that labels are unhelpful to our teaching practices when I initially began blogging, but I couldn't really put it into words.

And so, even in the very beginning of my blogging life (which has been greatly overshadowed by my being-a-dad life now), I chose to mostly share 'act 1's.  Like this compilation of act 1's in 2012.  I also specifically explored the differences between those two act 1's that I put in the same post.

A year later, I had a better feeling about this vague idea of mine, and so I argued that, "maybe we shouldn't share act 2's" when we blog.  I went on to write:

It is important for teachers to develop their own approaches and mold ideas into ones that will work for them.  In other words, just like how we want our students to construct their thoughts and understanding - why not do the same with teachers?  Makes sense to be constructivist through and through.  Emphasizing act 1 and act 3 may be the best way to approach this.

I've heard people say that "the three act idea doesn't work!" "Students get tired of always seeing these pictures and videos!" "I can't do this every day!"... so on and so forth

In my mind, there is an important relationship between what I was attempting to argue back then, and a recent conversation about #thinkingclassroom from Nat and several others

Cette conversation au sujet du "Thinking Classroom" est tellement importante. Quel est le but du modèle? Tableaux blancs, groupes aléatoires? Ou développer un culture d'autonomie et de réflexion? Est-ce qu'il y a juste une façon d'atteindre l'objectif?  https://t.co/CGhIPceI3G pic.twitter.com/gqNps0eU2v

— Pierre Tranchemontagne (@Pierre_Tranche) February 7, 2018

Pierre is completely right in that it is important to have conversations about more than just labels.  We need to really explore what it is that we're doing, instead of stopping short at labeling what we do - devoid of ourselves and our students.

Not to mention that labels are easy to dismiss.  "Oh, that 3-act stuff doesn't work." "Oh, I tried that #thinkingclassroom thing, it doesn't work for my kids"

But how do we have these conversations?

I attended Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group in 2016, and I was blown away by the format of one particular session.  It's a 'working group' that tackles a problem (in math education) together.  Participants in the same group talk and exchange ideas, and facilitators draw out ideas and help discussions.  We did this for several days.  The intention is not to direct, but to truly facilitate conversations - respecting and valuing the places that people are all at with respect to their lived experiences and expertise (participants include teachers, teacher educators, mathematicians, researchers).

It was refreshing.

These weren't presentations.  Or fake-facilitation where there's actually a secret agenda.

It seemed genuine, and I loved it.  It reminded me more of my own classroom activities, where students have/develop their own agency.

I then spent the next little while after attending CMESG, thinking about how I might be able to bring a similar kind of experience to our provincial wide math education conference that I typically attend - the OAME annual conference.

So I made up a rough idea of what the session might look like, and grabbed Al Overwijk and Bruce McLaurin to join me on this experimental session.

We then met on several occasions trying to figure out the details:

• What is our purpose of this session?
• What might our prompts be?
• What's something we can focus on?
• What can we debrief?
• Should we debrief?

We toiled over each one of them (not to mention other questions that came out).

To start, we needed a common task that has been popular enough for people to talk about.  This serves as the background on which we might have important conversations about: our particular teacher moves during class, our reasons for deciding on moves, our interpretations of the happenings of our classes/culture/lessons.

We know we really want to get to the meat of the session - our decisions for doing or not doing certain things, and under what circumstances - within lessons.

For us, these have emerged as important considerations - regardless of what tasks or activities we're running.

We wanted to create a space where people not only feel safe enough to share, but brave enough to really dig into why they do what they do.  A tall order for a class that we get to keep for one semester - a monstrous order for a 1 hour session.  We had a lot of discussion about whether we should share some of our own experiences.  If so, how we might do that.  Since we want to disturb the power dynamic of presenter vs audience, we decided not to.  

But then a different difficulty emerged: what might we debrief or consolidate?

We settled on 3 slides

The first slide is simply the title of the session:

The second one was

and finally

With the "five practices" in the back of our minds, we worked on anticipating the possible responses that people might have.

As people began to register, we also took note as to who had joined our session (at least on paper).

This was definitely a group of impressive thinkers and educators.  There were also a few well-known (on twitter) educators joining the session (e.g. Jon, Mary, Dan, and many more).  Since there were so many great people, we were excited about the possibilities of in-depth discussions about our practice.  At the same time, we also worried a bit about power dynamics a bit more.  Could the presence (of e.g. Dan Meyer) intimidate others from sharing their ideas? Or perhaps alter what they would have said in his absence?

But we can't control how people react, and so we went on with our initial plan.

People walked in, we sorted them in random groups with some cards, and then sent them to some temporary whiteboards to work on the two prompts.

Throughout the whole time we watched and listened to people's ideas and responses.  There were certainly a few themes that we were hearing.  Bruce, Al, and I passed each other frequently and exchanged quick words about "this group's talking about this in this way" and "this group is talking about that in this way".

Toward the end of the session, I stuck to our original plan.  I didn't share ideas about what we might do with barbie bungee (e.g. I don't use barbie).  Bruce and Al also held their tongue as we discussed.

Instead, I summarized some of the ideas that groups have come up with.  And in the spirit of the 5 practices, did my best to connect some of their ideas together (similarities, differences).

We then highlighted that the whole point of this session was to - from start to finish - focus on the different ways that we approach things, do things, think about things, explore things, make decisions about things.

I made a reference to the work on Flow from Peter Liljedahl (based on Csikszentmihalyi's work)

This was to emphasize that - what we do during classroom time - matters.

It isn't simply about setting up a well-known activity and everything will work out great.  It isn't about starting what has been a successful "3-act task" and calling it a day.  It isn't about simply having vertical whiteboards, and all the kids will suddenly love school.

It was to emphasize that our actions are what matters.  (I subsequently made a similar point during the ignite in the same conference linked here and here)

I also shared a google doc to invite people to read more or to discuss more - but also referencing the fact that barbie bungee had been brought up on several occasions by others in the past - when they noticed that it seemed to work for some, and not others.  (coincidentally Dan Meyer also talked about this at his keynote later that day - and gave us a quick shout-out)

As a side-note, Al and I subsequently did an impromptu session about the #thinkingclassroom the very next session, because their presenter didn't show up.  Al mainly led the session and he did an excellent job as he always does.  When I tweeted out that we (mostly Al) did an impromptu session, it was confused with our bungee session.  It was a bit regrettable since we put so much thought into that session for it to be something 'impromptu.'

Some Reflections After the Session

Bruce, Al, and I spoke about this session afterward.  I enjoyed it, but was unsettled.  I wanted more.  I wanted to dig more at what surfaced.  I felt that we could go so much deeper into our teacher moves - and worried that we didn't go far enough.  Bruce and I chatted a bit about this - and he thought it went well.  He made a good point that it was difficult to build that environment that quickly to begin with.

But I suppose it's a consistent theme with me - where I always want more discussions, deeper debates, and further explorations.

This upcoming OAME we have a session that also aims to explore how we do what we do.  Bruce, who had retired since then, will unfortunately not been joining us (he is absolutely amazing, and certainly had a quiet exit like Tim Duncan).

Instead, I'm excited to have Nat Banting join us for this upcoming session, which will use another popular task/activity as a background: Visual Patterns.

There are some obvious ties to the amazing work that Fawn Nguyen has been doing, but we also wanted to open the doors to other ways of using and having visual patterns beyond the website.

In any case... stay tuned!

What are your thoughts?

As people that respect agency and learning, how do you facilitate adult learning in the brief conference sessions that we often have?  How do you navigate power dynamics as well as perceived 'right answers' or 'silver bullets'?