What We Lose When We Optimize Everything

I have the type of personality that is really drawn to data and optimization. I have a Garmin watch and I really enjoy experimenting to see what impacts my sleep, how my sleep changes over time, how my running has improved (or declined) over time, how my diet impacts stress, etc. This is fun for me, I keep copious notes and spreadsheets as I monitor various metrics of interest. My husband has no interest in such data. He has a watch that tracks various things, but he really doesn’t even look at any of them. He never even downloaded the app for the watch. He doesn’t let metrics dictate what he does day to day. He just likes to know the time and sometimes thinks it is interesting to see how many steps he’s gotten.

I feel like there is likely lessons to take from both perspectives. It can be extremely beneficial to learn from data and allow data to drive decisions when it makes sense to do so. At the same time, allowing yourself to trust your body and how you feel over a metric that came from an algorithm of unknown development is likely also a sensible practice. In education, it seems we have different levels of the system with differing views on metrics.

Often, administrators and other leaders are attending to metrics. They want to know how xyz performs in response to abc. This is often sensible. However, it can also create pressure to narrowly focus on those metrics. Moreover, it might mean that we aren’t attending to other metrics that, while important, are hard to quantify. Such metrics may include important aspects of teaching and learning such as teacher and students’ engagement, interest, creativity, etc. However, we also know that if we don’t focus on metrics we may overlook troubling patterns of marginalization or opportunity in schools and classrooms. Moreover, the more we start focusing on this practice has been shown to move this metric, we are likely to start funneling people toward the practice. This can remove some of the creativity and art of teaching which is necessary for personal fufillment, new insights, and just teacher autonomy.

As we move toward technology that seeks to capture, quantify, and predict performance, I think we are at risk of losing the creativity of teaching. I don’t want a world where we funnel everyone toward the same instructional model losing the individual strengths and art of teaching some teachers bring to the profession. I recently watch a documentary called Murder 101 and I think that in conjunction with my recent work with large datasets has driven this post. In that documentary, Alex Campbell, a sociology teacher in rural Tennessee brings in a true crime cold case for his high school students to examine. He discusses the importance of project based learning and capturing students’ interest. He also has a great metaphor that describes his role in the complex education system as that of a rat on the bottom of large ship (seriously check out the movie). Anyhow, his class develops community, empathy, and a deeper understanding of their role in systems as a result of their investigation. Many students past and present shared about the positive impact Mr. Campbell had on them. Moreover, the students also helped try to solve a thirty year old murder case. When I think about how data might try to funnel teachers such as Mr. Campbell more toward a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction it makes me sad. What would we lose in that situation? Sure, we might gain something as well, but is the risk worth the reward? I fear, most seriously of all, we may lose creative, engaging teachers such as Mr. Campbell who don’t fit the mold and that would be a great loss to the profession and to his community.

I don’t have answers, but I do think it is worth being quite clear on what we value in our classrooms and from our practice. They don’t have to all be measurable, but the more we can put into words what we value, what we hope our students gain, and how what we do might make things a little better it will help us broaden our foci so that we retain some of our autonomy and creativity while also attending to things that matter for more pragmatic reasons.

Instructional Nudge – Here’s Where I’m At

In our work on the PDPD project, we noticed that when students are given time to talk about math, they often talk about complete problems and their solutions. We created the Here’s Where I’m At Nudge to try to remind us that students can talk before they are finished with a problem or problem set. In fact, you’ll often get more intersting and helpful talk if you encourage students to talk about what they have been trying, if it is working, where they are stuck, a wrong turn they took, etc. So if you need a reminder to get students talking at different points during a task, here it is. We even has a brief video you can watch that gives an overview of the nudge if you prefer that over a one-pager.

UnTeach Project – Counting is Complex

One of the things I wish everyone understood is just how complex counting is! Many of us take counting as a basic, easy concept since we learned it when we were so very young. However, consider the picture below. If I asked you to count how many dogs are in the picture, a number of things are necessary before you can even do that.

First, you have to know what I mean by count and what I mean by dogs to even answer that question. This is not trivial in this instances because there are non-dogs in the picture as well as dogs so you have to discern what is or is not a dog. But even before that, there are some skills or understandings you’d need to have including knowing the counting sequence (1, 2, 3, …) and having one-to-one correspondence. This means knowing you count each object just once. This is tricky because children may count gaps, double count, or just not remember what they have or have not counted due to lack of organizational strategies. Then, students also need to know that the last number they say is the sum total of all objects (something called cardinality). If they don’t have cardinality yet, that might mean they think that 5 only refers to the fifth thing they counted or they may recount every time because they don’t connect that final number with the total number of objects. I’ve simplified this a bit, but you likely get the idea. Counting is complex and needs time to develop. This means students need lots of time to interact with different objects in different arrays to just count and count. They should also be given a number and then count out that number of objects (a bit of a reversal from always giving them the objects to count). Then, we still have to start to connect numerals to all of this and then also written number words. There are many other topics that are complex that we may not appreciate, and I’ll try to keep thinking on some to share. In the meantime if you have suggestions let me know!

Upcoming Events

My travel is finally slowing down, so I don’t have any events in the near future. Here’s what I do have planned coming up.

NCSM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado

I’ll be a major speaker (I am so excited!). I’ll be presenting a session titled, “Ideas for Aligning Messages, Actions, Feedback and Evidence and Data to Feedback and Actions” on October 28th.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado

I’ll be rebooting one of my favorite sessions I’ve done. It’s called “Thinking Outside the Box with Substitution and Elimination” and I’ll be presenting it on October 29th.