Activity 6.2 Videos on Problem Solving

The video on Math Class Needs a makeover reminds me of an experience I had in student teaching.  I was placed in Woodford County High School in a literature class with thirteen young men and one young woman.  Every day we were required to complete entry and exit slip exercises. Up until the point I took over both of these were simply three or four sentences (cloze or short answer) on the board which students were required to answer on a piece of paper they turned in to the teacher.  In the entry exercise I witnessed, a short text was distributed to the students.  In it a young girl was setting up a classroom for her dolls in her bedroom, using papers she retrieved from the trash in her teacher’s classroom.  Content questions about the text were written on the board.  The students were definitely unmotivated, disinterested, just wanted the correct vocabulary to complete the sentences so they could forget the entire exercise as quickly as possible…I wanted to forget the exercise.  When I was asked to deliver the entry and exit slips, I asked if I could change the format.  I incorporated photos and short videos and projected the entry and exit slips every day.  I chose subjects such as tractor pulls and chase scenes.  I asked the students to write their own questions, hypothesize endings, or just write three descriptive statements about what they had seen.  We talked about what we were seeing and used participation as a criteria.  I asked questions, eventually, using content vocabulary and they were able to respond.  This experience isn’t precisely what was happening in the math class, but it was similar.  It brings me back to the question, also, of motivation.  Historically I believe I have tended to underestimate the role of motivation in student learning.  I am beginning to see that it plays a much more important role than I realized.

I thought that the observation about raising the stakes for the marshmallow challenge was extremely interesting.  I work with large scale assessments and I tend to believe that assessment results are not being used the way they were intended to be used.  Of course this is a contentious issue in our political and educational environment, but surely this is an analogous situation.  The stakes for summative assessment have consistently elevated and there has been a corresponding escalation in unintended (and unfavorable) consequences, one of which arguably is that students are not experiencing education in a rich and thoughtful way as one would hope they would.  In other words, just as in the case of the marshmallow challenge, the higher stakes (which could be positive in terms of funding and recognition) have actually led to less proficient accomplishments with respect to the problem solving goal of proficiency for all students.  Nel Noddings notes that students who buy into the achievement motivation are “often both “successful” and miserably unhappy.” (Nodding, 2006, p. 17).  She encourages educators to ask themselves what achievement motivation is and whether or not being motivated to achieve is always a good thing.  It is difficult to conceive, but perhaps there should have been a little more work on the front end, a better recognition and consequent definition of the problem as Pretz, Naples and Sternberg would recommend, with less focus on developing the solution strategy.