"Change" expecting the joy , living with the uncomfortable outcomes.

This past week I spent a fair bit of time designing a few lessons for my year 12 maths class around graphing functions. I decided to use a lovely online graphing website called Desmos to offer up the introduction to the topic. I started with quadratics, a topic the students are quite familiar with. My expectation was  that students would be happy to engage in an exploration on a function that they already knew something about.

I was so pleased with myself. I had designed a google worksheet that lead them to the outcomes they needed and links on a google doc that allowed them to go to pre-prepared desmos graphing sites which would help them with their exploration. How clever was I!

What I was expecting was a happy engaged group of girls where I could be out of the main fray and have the learning in the hands of the students with sprinkles of my intervention when they got lost.

What I witnessed was 40 minutes of uncomfortable activity by a group of girls who blinked lot and kept looking to me like I had just thrown them into a den of goblins. Really?? It was so disappointing. Where was the wow factor, the joyful chatter of collaboration, the grateful recognition that Ms Crabbe had stopped talking at them and allowed them to think and work independently, to explore and consolidate in their own time the features of this concept.

I reflected that night on this, looked at my clientele and realise that this structure was a foreign land for these students in maths, a subject they lack confidence in. Although I try to change it up as much as possible, their model of learning maths has never looked like this. Its always been a teacher showing a process and then having the students mimic that process. Its never been about finding their way with  a minimum of teacher input.  When we went over what they had learned the next day , they had indeed come to most of the right places, and more importantly I discovered their misconceptions, the things they understood and could add clarity where it was needed.

So the next day I gave them something similar to do, no blinking, no fear, they just got on with it confident that at the end of the trail the destination would be made clear.

What did I learn?
That changing pedagogy and how learning happens it not just difficult for teachers, but students as well. That not all students will embrace this different approach and that you must be gentle in the implementation. That one must persist but be willing to go back and forth between the new and the old to get where you need to be. To remember the journey of learning is not about how flash the tool, how thoughtful the preparation, its about the students, its about getting them to think, to challenge, to do deliberate and meaningful practice. And sometimes it has no wow factor, sometimes it just about, as a teacher, being able to sit still, amongst the uncomfortable, puzzled expressions that plead silently for rescue...... and do nothing.