Harkness Attempt... Take 2 - Learning from observations

At the beginning of the year, I tried using a Harkness method of instruction with one of my math classes.  It is a class with students who have traditionally struggled with math and I knew a lot of them from previous classes.   I blogged about my first attempt here a bit... it didn't go so hot.

I abandoned it and planned on going to observe a teacher in AZ who uses this method exclusively with their students.

At first I thought my students didn't know how to collaborate - I was wrong though.  When I gave them a quiz and then mid-quiz told students they could work with their team, students had a fantastic conversation with one another.  SO... they knew how to talk about math... they just needed a bit more skin in the game.

While in AZ, I observed how a teacher ran their classroom.  I don't know how to put this in a narrative format, so, in no particular order, here's what I learned:

• I don't need to give students time to work on the problems ahead of time - and students don't NEED to do homework.  The teachers I saw gave students 2-3 problems for homework and then discussed them (and maybe a few others) in class the next day.  It seemed do-able.  My group of students is not the best at doing homework, so I was worried that if doing homework was REQUIRED for using harkness, this would not be possible for my students.  Observing gave me hope that this was not necessary.  Don't get me wrong, having students do the work ahead of time would make the material stick with students more.
• I still needed to build discussion norms with students.  At the school I observed, EVERY class was discussion based.  Students were expected to lead discussions more than I think my students ever had been asked to.  So, while the school I observed was philosophically aligned with discussion based learning across content areas, my students would not have the same background in discussion based learning.  This also motivated me to get into some English classrooms to get to see what discussions emerge in other classes and how they are framed/scaffolded. 
• Problems build slowly but also widely.  In this school I saw problems in one class hour that I normally wouldn't see in the same unit or even same year in a traditional curriculum.  I totally get the benefit of this AND perhaps if we did more of this we wouldn't end up re-teaching linear equations, slopes, quadratics, SohCahToa, OVER and OVER again each year.
• There is an ebb and flow to the class.  The teacher would bring the class together to clarify something for the group, making sure everyone was focused on him/her for a bit, and then give students a clear "now with this information, go do _______".  This helped re-focus the class when needed.

Alright.  So, I observed.  I thought about how I was going to apply this in my classroom.  After 2 weeks of processing all of this I rolled it out in my classroom. 

Learning from last time and knowing that I needed students to think differently about learning - maybe even radically differently about learning,  I had students read an article that Dr. Jonothon Sauer gave me about how we learn.  It was actually a hugely helpful way to start off.  Students were confused as to why we were reading in math.  I think shocking them a bit out of their comfort zone with this article helped set a tone for a "new era".  That being said, the discussion we had was equally as important.  When I asked students to summarize the article... some of their summaries were inaccurate at best.  In fact, some of what they supposedly "got" from the article was downright wrong.   I am planning on going back to this article in a few weeks to re-read and process it together. 

From there we talked about how participation should look.