Month: April 2016 (page 1 of 1)

In 1965 a pair of researchers, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, set out to study the Pygmalion Effect, which hypothesizes that if we hold high expectations for people’s performance, their performance will be better than if we hold low expectations.

Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968

What they found was startling, especially for younger kids. Students who had been randomly selected as being likely to show potential based on an imaginary test and then this information communicated to their teachers, showed tremendous gains in the intellectual ability compared to the control group.

Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968

The reverse effect, called the Golem Effect, has also found to have an impact through randomized-control-sample experimental design. This means that one factor into student performance is the expectations teachers have, either high or low, on that student performance.

Every time you refer to your students as “low kids” you are re-enforcing expectations of future achievement that limit children. #NCSM16

— David Wees (@davidwees) April 12, 2016

This is why I get incredibly frustrated when teachers use labels like “high” or “low” to describe their students. Invariably these labels are like self-fulfilling prophesies that lead to strengthening or weakening student beliefs about their own ability to be successful and lead to teachers, subconsciously, taking actions that lead to either higher or lower student performance, and as performance is related to student learning, this can be devastating.

Of course, this pernicious labeling of students is built right into our systems of education so we can hardly consider individual teachers to be at fault. We have the ELL students, the SpEd students, the “lower third”, the students who only achieved a 1 or a 2 on the NY state exam, the students who failed algebra last semester, and other unhelpful labels for students ad nauseam.

So what do we do? I propose a good starting place is to eliminate unhelpful labels from our own vocabulary. Another step is to talk to our colleagues about our shared use of labels for students. Find ways to look for and talk about strengths in students rather than perceived deficits.

CLIME (The Council for Technology in Math Education) is an affiliate of NCTM with the mission to:

Empower math communities to improve the teaching and learning of math through the use of dynamic tools in a Web 2.0 world

Last night members of CLIME and other interested people attended a meeting of CLIME to discuss the its future.

In order to understand the role of CLIME in promoting the use of technology in math education, one has to understand a bit of the history, so Ihor Charischak (the long-time President of CLIME) started us off with a brief recap.

We then discussed some ideas for how we could better support the meaningful and productive use of technology through the NCTM annual meeting. Note that for this meeting our focus was on improving the NCTM conferences rather than all of the other ways we can support technology use. We brainstormed the following list of ideas.

1. We could find people doing interesting work with technology and invite them to submit proposals on that use.

2. We could set up an area in the exhibit hall and run mini-technology based sessions where educators could come to learn about how to use dynamic geometry software, learn how to get started with blogging, how to set up a Twitter account, etc… One benefit of this arrangement is that we could offer to help people install software (or find and bookmark websites) so that people who wanted to run workshops on the same technology later would be more likely to have a group of attendees with the software already ready to go.

3. We could suggest the labeling of sessions on technology as beginner versus advanced so that people who need help installing software, finding the menus in that software, and getting started with their initial exploration of the technology can have support and that people who are already experts in the use of technology can share ideas back and forth.

4. We offered that the program NCTM has started where presenters add additional information about their sessions and invite participants to comment on and ask questions about sessions could be extended. This way the 50 words or so presenters have to describe their work could be increased without dramatically changing the experience of conference organizers (who have to read all of those descriptions and make decisions about who gets to present at the conference).

5. We could continue to review the existing program after it is published and offer feedback to the NCTM program organizers to use with the next conference.

6. We could run our own technology in math education conference. We noted the importance of a face to face conference for encouraging networking between math educators but we still considered a hybrid or entirely online conference as well.

7. We wondered about ways we could encourage the younger generation of math teachers to participate in NCTM’s conference.

8. We could form a technology study group with the aim of cataloging and reviewing different technologies in use in math education and then potentially presenting our findings at an NCTM conference.

If you were tasked with promoting the meaningful use of technology in math education through a conference experience, what else would you do?