Just Sitting Down

I had an elementary ed class canceled for low enrollment and got a calculus course instead. It's really been a teaching challenge, which is always good for a teacher educator. Usually when I teach calculus, I start with integration. It's more intuitive than derivatives, and a lot of our calc I students have had some calculus before and think they know it because they can take derivatives of polynomials. But I have the good fortune to be in a department with Matt Boelkins, who's written a terrific calculus book, free to students, so I'm trying to be more of a team player.

I have not been able to establish a good culture of collaboration, and say at least 20 times a class to talk to their tablemates as they work on activities. I'm using random grouping daily, and by now most have worked with most others. I'm disappointed in myself that I have not made more tasks into complex instruction tasks, which would help with interaction A LOT. But time is what it is.

The heart of the differential calculus part of the course to me is the optimization and related rates sections. Making sense of rate of change in context for optimization. And the power of the derivative idea in related rates. We can take the derivative with respect to time even when time is not a variable! Astounding!

After two days on optimization and two days on related rates I had not gotten a lot of the in class assessment options back, and I thought they were intimidated by the problems. So I took an extra day to do one more of each. Both pretty standard problems which I added some small wrinkles.

They all set to work, parallel play as always. I encouraged talk, which as usual got a minute of conversation, then back to themselves. I paused class to get some shared thinking on the whiteboard.

Finally I just started sitting down with the groups. Asked where they were, found out from each member, and asked questions that got them explaining to each other what they thought. Table by table, sat with everyone. I know, on some level, that if you want learners to do something you have to model it, but do I do it? The rest of the class conversation was pretty good.

The next class we started integration thinking, and discourse was better than average. So I think I'm going to continue sitting down on the job. As opportunity allows.