Transcriber: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
SB: Welcome. Hello everyone. Today Dan and I are going to be ...
– let's see if we can get this presentation going... all right, all right, cool! Ha, ha ... –
So, above all welcome. Today we're going to be talking to you guys about
changing perceptions, motivation, students, efficiency, effectiveness
DN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Sean! SB: What?
DN: Do you have any idea how many words you just put in the audience...?
SB: Yeah! Oh!
DN: Let's clear things up a little bit.
What are the main ideas we're going to be talking about today?
SB: OK, all right, fair enough.
How about perceptions, students, math, themselves...
Yeah, something like that. DN: Ok, that clears things [up] a little bit better.
But can you organise the ideas
so it is perfectly clear to the audience what we are talking about?
SB: Ok, I'll take care of that. (Laughter) Sorry, so, I get a little excited.
Talk about changing perceptions of math by teaching students to teach themselves.
DN: All right, here we go! Much better. So, as our title screen just showed you,
how we organise words affects how we understand
the very meaning those words are meant to convey.
So if we don't take the time to organise words,
we can be very overwhelmed and confused
by something like this, instead of having...
yeah, that's overwhelming and confusing.
Instead of having something clear and understandable, like this.
So the next thing we want to talk to you about,
is how prior organisation of words
can affect how we understand and perceive new words
and the ideas those words are supposed to represent. So...
SB: Ok, all right, so you know what I want to say?
Did I tell you that Marcy and I are getting a dog?
DN: Yeah, I don't think this is the proper time to talk about that!
SB: We got the time! DN: But I guess we... (Laughter)
Actually, this is kind of embarrassing, but I don't really know what a dog is,
er, can you explain?
SB: Dan you're a high-school teacher and you don't know what a dog is?
DN: Hopefully none of our students are watching. (Laughter)
SB: Alright. I mean, you guys, stay with me on this.
A dog is, you know, four legs, has a head, furry and can lie down.
I mean we all agree, right? That's what a dog is. Dan?
DN : Don't you guys already have already one of those things?
SB: Oh my, Dan! You're blowing this presentation, bud!
Come on, man, let's get it together.
What do you think, can you draw a picture for this people of what you think it is?
DN: this.. ugly table with a '70's shag cloth,
in the middle of you guys' living room, that's a dog, right?
SB: Dan! How can you confuse four legs..? I.. You know ... I don't even..
This is a dog, Dan. It's got four legs, it barks, it goes woof...
DN: Aw! I've seen one of those before.
SB: All right. Dan you've got to fix it for these people!
They.. you got it. How did you confuse a dog into a table?
DN: Ok, well, you said four legs. Furniture has four legs,
... lies down, folding table, OK?
Furry, '70s shag carpet, you can put that on a table,
Clearly that's a dog, Sean. That's a dog!
SB: Dan, I'm actually not... I'm not even mad, I'm actually impressed.
How you did that is beyond me.
Four legs: How about an animal? Dan, did you stop to think about that?
Furry, lies down... THAT is a dog, Dan!
OK? Got it? All right! So, what this is meant to illustrate is dog vs. table.
This idea is, schema is the very ways we organise words in our brain,
especially the organization of prior words affects how we perceive new words.
in the case of math, where it's even more abstract, this gets challenging.
You know, in this case I could show a picture to Dan and be like,
"Oh this is a dog, got it?" All right! But how about in math?
where we're like, "Ok, hey, come here, quadratic formula!
Come on kids, pet the quadratic formula!"
Or, "Did you see that pesky quadratic formula running across the street yesterday?"
I didn't think so. All right? As ideas get more abstract,
we ourselves need more set and firm schemas.
Dan's going to talk a little bit about how that looks in math.
DN: So, based on dog vs. table,
what is the key component to correctly perceiving and learning mathematics?
Developing proficiency with number use seems pretty important,
memorization of processes seems pretty important,
cognitive organization of math words seems pretty important,
but Sean, I realize you didn't know what I put in D there.
I'm sure the entire audience wants to talk about spaceships. So...
SB: Don't... Just stop! He's going to try to show you
through a schema how he can connect perceiving and learning
all the way to spaceships and now you're gonna let him do it.
DN : All right, all right! SB: Dan please, let's get to the point.
DN: Ok. So the real answer's actually C.
Based on this, Sean and I wondered:
what are the math words that students actually have to organise
as they're going through their education?
Well, what we did is we went through the common core standards.
Now if you're not familiar with them, these are a set of standards
that are sweeping across the entire United States,
almost every state has begun adopting them in some way.
These are the words that a kindergartener is expected to know,
at least to have in their vocabulary based on the concepts in those standards.
OK? Then we move on to first grade. Now we realize you'll never
be able to read all these, but I just want you to get the big picture.
OK? Let me move on to second grade.
And we're just going to jump up to sixth grade for you.
You'll notice a similarity between this and our title screen.
It's pretty overwhelming as you can see, why some students
get to sixth grade math and go, "I'm done, can't do this anymore."
So, what we wondered was, is it possible to organise these?
Well, not only is it possible, we've actually done it.
So, instead of having a confusing mess of words,
you can cognitively organise them based on definition.
Right, so when a student is on the first grade
instead of having a bunch of words strewing around,
they start connecting them to everything else.
Now we're going to jump up to sixth grade again for the second time,
now we realize you can't see everything on there.
However, things are now organised. So they can perceive and understand
all this information in a proper manner.
The observation that Sean and I had from this was:
well, what if they don't know any of these words?
what if they don't have one of these connections?
What if one of these connections is connected in a not-so-efficient way?
So, what we thought was, not only will it affect their success,
but if they're overwhelmed by all this information,
it's going to affect their confidence in mathematics
and it's going to affect their motivation to even try mathematics.
So Sean, do you want to give a little context to that ?
SB: Yes, I will try to give you guys some context.
So stop, think for a moment:
what is an activity, a job or an interest that you are personally doing right now
that you feel very confident in? I would imagine that if I asked you to list
a whole series of words that were related to that,
you could give me a long list,
you could even describe to me how they were connected.
Imagine when you first started that. What if Dan and myself gave you a map?
What if we showed you how those words were connected?
How would that have affected your perceptions?
How would that have affected your motivation?
How much quicker could you've gotten to the level you're at now?
With that, we're going to show you how this works in our class:
all critical terms plus organization leads to effective perceptions
which help to drive motivation and success.
DN: So, as Sean just said, we are going to talk about
how we created an experience in our classrooms
where students can now cognitively organise information,
effectively perceive information
and have an overall clear understanding of mathematics.
Now, just like this basic outline here,
what we do is we get our students to move from something that's scary and messy
– this is like kindergarten information –
into something that's organised and understandable like this.
So, as you said before, we start off with vocabulary.
Ok, we'll show just a few terms up here, in just a moment,
that you've probably seen before.
We're not going to test you, don't worry!
You're after TEDxHonolulu stuff, it's not going to be dependent on passing a test,
but from gaining to go through and build their vocabulary in literacy with these,
we then have them start mapping them out, based on definition.
In kindergarten, the starting point is normally numbers.
And then from there, we have our students go through
word by word and look at the definition,
and you can actually see connections in those definitions:
Whole Numbers, Counting, Place Values, all have numbers in the definitions.
SB: So, you can start to do as you saw with operations as expressions,
– I'll just go back real quick – kinda show you what that looks like.
We can even start to hit them with more terms
and they start to know where to place them.
What we've categorized in this slide is a tipping point:
you can see that as you get more and more, it starts to become more and more clear,
without even showing them math, how these ideas relate.
The best part is that they can do this on their very own.
Dan now is going to show you what it looks like when we show them math content.
DN: So, notice, we haven't done any math problems yet.
Our students now have a big picture understanding
of how everything is related. They are not quite as overwelmed
when we start presenting them with activities, labs, examples that they go through on their own.
So, we do a thing in our class where essentially
when I go through this content, they make a tweet.
Now if you're not familiar with Twitter, and hopefully all of you are now,
essentially it's just a quick little visual and a phrase
that attaches to that word.
So for example with numbers, they might say something like,
"How many? Give a few examples." OK?
And then they run the whole numbers and an observation they might make is,
"Zero, count up by one." I give a quick little example.
This continues on and on, but we realize sometimes
two things can come up at once.
Now that they have a structure in place,
they can now handle working with multiple ideas at the same time,
and know how this content fits together to create an overall big picture understanding.
So, we move from something that's kinda scary like this
into something that's organised and makes sense like this.
Now some of the effects this has had on our students is,
they now have this perception in their mind of –
"Ok, well, if I see this word, I know what content's connected to it from my tweet.
If I see this word I know what other words it's connected to
and the content that's connected to those,
instead of this disorganised mess that's in their heads sometimes
when they are doing things high-pressured like taking a test,
ACT, PSAT, things like that.
So, Sean is going to show us some more results.
SB: So, what does this afford us in our classroom?
As far as performance goes, we've completely and entirely
started getting our students to teach themselves, OK?
Stop and think about that: actually teaching themselves,
that can go on to any other class. So we've created a lasting student achievement,
regardless of whether they connect with the next year's or following years' teacher
or then they go off to college where it's lecture blaze, hands-on –
they can actually have the confidence to teach themselves.
The most amazing part is: we've managed to do this without lecturing.
That's right! Not one day of standing up like this
towards you guys right now, lecturing.
In fact, if we had it our ways, we would have just given you
the list of words of how to do this and we would've had you start building the map, all right?
But for you non-teachers, our students come in every day.
They sit down, they start working in collaborative groups,
they're on their own and they start working with the words.
They make their own connections and they start to start problem solving
creatively, entirely on their own!
So Dan's going to share a little with you how this has affected his algebra class.
DN: So, this kind of the mess I can hear of teaching:
I'm an emergency hire, which means I've no formal teacher training whatsoever.
Last year in my freshman algebra class, my passing rate was only 52%.
Now, after implementing this,
I have moved from a 52% passing rate all the way up to an 86% passing rate.
(Cheers) (Applause)
(Laughter)
SB: I've been teaching geometry now for five years.
I originally came over with Teach for America,
for those of you that are familiar with that,
I came over in 2006, the first quarter I actually came to Hawaii.
I was placed to Waipahu, I did my two years, I stayed longer
'cause I enjoy the students here in Hawaii so much.
They're great kids out here!
For those of you who haven't had an opportunity to be in a classroom,
they're amazing!
I've never been able to break 60% pass rate in my geometry class,
which has driven me nuts! Last year I actually almost quit!
I had applied, took my LSAT, I was looking at law-school and then
Dan and I started thinking about these ideas
and I've been able to move them from 58 to 89%.
(Cheers) (Applause)
DN: So, the next class we're going to talk to you about is statistics and probability.
It's a new course at the school that we started,
so there is no previous statistics on it.
However, the book that we're using is a college textbook,
the students are currently teaching themselves college material,
and I have all of my students passing my class right now.
Dramatic! (Applause)
The next group, I'm most proud of, as for the reason I joined Teach For America,
for those of you who're not familiar with them,
you leave your undergraduate
and you go to schools where students face many challenges.
Many of my students face things from teen pregnancy to domestic violence,
homelessness, health care issues,
the list is long and very long.
Because of this, we've had to come up with new ways of teaching.
There's a lot of teachers doing great things
but one thing we're proud of is, because we don't lecture,
we can actually work with each student one-on-one.
So instead of asking, "Hey, how is that math problem going?"
we move beyond that and we can now ask students,
"Hey, how is everything in your life going? Everything all right at home?".
And now that students instead of walking in our class going, "Oh, God, math!",
they're like, "Oh, hey, I know Mr. Briel and Mr. Nash care." All right.
Just that simple question has allowed me to move from 12%
to 65% and these are students that had failed math 2, 3 –
I have actually quite a handful of 4th time in algebra!
And now they at least come to class and they feel that they can learn.
(Applause)
DN: So, what does this actually afford us?
Well, by organizing ideas, we've been able to change and shift
our perceptions of what learning actually is.
So, from this, we've actually been able to create a classroom experience
that allows our students to organise ideas
and change their perceptions of learning,
and now we have a class where our students are learning how to do things like
critically think, creatively problem-solve, all on their own, instead of listening to me talk.
And thank you for all listening. I know I'm kind of boring.
On top of that, we as teachers have also been able to re-establish
our value in the classroom.
Instead of just our content-area expertise, we can now create an experience
for our students where it's completely them doing everything
and we're just there to help them through it.
So, and on top of that, what's kind of even more impressive to us is
now we have students who are seeing the value of learning and education.
Next two quotes we're going to show to you are quotes
directly from our students about their experience in their classroom.
First one says, "Now, since I had this class,
I think smart is just organised.
If everyone had a mental map and organised every idea,
then everyone will be as smart as the other."
This is from a student who is currently taking algebra 1 for the third time.
So, the next quote:
"The day we are born, we pick things up, learn, and we adapt.
We understand things based on the ideas we have learned.
Our understanding of new ideas changes based on the way
we organised past experiences and ideas.
If one of our experiences or ideas is a bad one,
then it will affect how we perceive new ideas or experiences.
We can use maps to change the way we organise things in our mind
to see all the possibilities in our lives."
This is from a second-time student in algebra 1
based on the experiences they've had in our classroom.
So, what has this afforded us?
Well, we believe we've been able to actually start developing critical thinkers
by teaching our students to organise ideas, recognise how they organise these ideas
affects their perceptions. And this goes way beyond the classroom.
Imagine: thinkers that understand and recognise the very ideas and the power
and how they organise them
will affect the possibilities they see in their very lives.
Think of the impact this would have on individuals:
individuals would recognise that all they needed to reach
the possibilities in their lives would be the critical terms,
the time to organise them and just the time to see it all materialise.
Imagine the impact that would have on communities:
communities can come together when individuals meet!
They will recognise that, "Hey we don't disagree,
these are just perceptual differences!
We can take the time to collect the words from everyone's maps
and come up with powerful solutions.
They're not just to address just one perception but many perceptions."
What impact would this have on society?
Think about that: a whole society where everyone's coming together.
It's because of this that we think developing critical thinkers
is not only necessary for our children,
but ourselves as well!
The most important part is – we believe developing critical thinkers
is the lifeline for individuals, communities, to society
to become what they want, can, dream and should be.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)