I had the privilege of attending a training for high school math teachers last week, led by Kristine Lindeblad. She's terrific; if you get the chance to participate in a training by her, by all means, go for it!
She started by giving us a survey, which we filled out, crumpled into balls and threw around the room to insure anonymity. Then we created human bar graphs to show the results, and whoever had the largest shoe size, most number of siblings, born the furthest away got to report out. We then created two different graphs to show two of the questions, and put TAILS on each of them (Title, Axes, Increments, Labels, Scales). Kristine staged which graphs were shown to the class, and asked us to provide an affirmation and a probing question for each graph. I liked that the exercise built community, gave us an idea of what areas were most important for these teachers, and modeled affirmations and questions, which is a great way to give positive feedback.
We did several other activities throughout the day, and at each step, Kristine kept the focus on our learning, modeling what a student-centered classroom looks like. She asked good questions, but always kept the atmosphere positive and encouraging. She had us read parts of Never Say Anything a Kid Can Say! by Stephen Rinehart, which is a great reminder for me: I need to ask more than I explain. One tip that I will take to heart is "Don't carry a pencil" because then you can't write out the solution for the student; he or she needs to do the writing (and learning!) themselves. I can't wait to try some of these ideas with the students.
