Jay Kloppenberg

Always consider the Lesson Behind the Lesson

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

"The assumption that there are no alternatives between following ready-made rules and trusting to native gifts is contradicted by the procedures of every art." (Dewey, 1916)

...yet this assumption persists in nearly every education debate I see on twitter.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

I am not currently a maths teacher but I do have several years experience teaching it. I also have used ppt a lot from my consulting days.

I just never found it particularly useful when teaching maths, hence the question.

In the specific example you gave, I can perhaps see a minor benefit of ppt over, say, drawing pictures on a chalkboard, but I'm not sure. The big advantage of a chalkboard is that you can fill in the pictures *and* you can challenge the students to do so at the board.

(btw, I wouldn't consider equivalent fractions a "dry" topic at all. My daughter, for example, calls this "pizza math" and it is probably her favorite topic I've ever taught her)

Anyway, thanks for the response. I appreciate it. Glad kids enjoyed her lesson.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

In first grade, my public school put me in a grade 1-2 split class. Every morning we walked into a classroom with a series of grade 1 assignments on one side of the board, and grade 2 assignments on the other side. The whole class sat and worked until we finished, then there were play activity options we could choose between for the remaining time before recess. If you got stuck or had a problem you could ask the teacher and she would come over and help.

Do schools still do this? Because it was wildly effective, despite the fact that she had to simultaneously teach two curricula to two sets of students.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@DanaPalubiak You're right. I should have said, we would have much *more* employable 7 year olds. Which should, of course, be the goal.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

Tangentially related, I was coaching a teacher yesterday, and one thing I told her was that there is a misconception that if you are asking students more open-ended questions, you can be less rigorous about your preparation. I think it is exactly the opposite. If I want students to work independently or in groups, I need to be be exceptionally precise about the exact wording of my question/assignment, to make 100% sure they all know exactly what to do and have the skill to engage effectively. Otherwise it can fall apart (as I witnessed!)

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

I joke, but the big thing here is, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the long tem goals?

For instance, I want my kids to be voracious readers, because I think that will help them in lots of extrinsic and intrinsic ways.

How to best do that? The most important thing seems to be to get them to love reading.

How do you do that? Well, they need to know how, so they need phonics. But that's not enough.

They need support, encouragement, the right level materials, etc.

But I noticed that trying to "push" my daughter into more challenging reading was counterproductive. Things she found easy were better (which fits with the research on athletic performance, btw). Now she's nine, and last week she read 3 400 page books. I wish I read as much.

I think sometimes we are forced as teachers to think too short term about our students, and not strategically enough.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@mathillustrated @AndyNelson1977 Lol. 1938?

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@TolentinoTeach Agreed. Get the main things right, and do then over and over.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@p_kuperman I dont really know what to make of this post. The best I can do is to see it as referencing the value of low-intensity high-volume work?

(Which i do think is very important and underrated, but I dont think that's what you mean to be talking about?) Would love a clarification

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@JakeCowling I am on the other end. It is very rare that I see a class with ppt that couldn't be made better by throwing it out

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@petergates3 @JakeCowling I dont doubt that a great teacher coukd do this. But...why?

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@MartinCothran @mathillustrated I'm reading it right now. The biggest surprise so far, based on what I had read about it twitter, is how much he agrees with Dewey. I expected him to eviscerate Dewey, but his vitriol is mostly limited to Kilpatrick.

I don't agree with everything, but it is a very good book.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

I fully agree with the first two sentences of this. And while I question whether there are really educational romanticists running schools into the ground like this, I'll admit to ignorance on all the schools out there. So the third sentence may be true as well.

But I think if you replaced "romantic" with "traditionalist" (or better, neo-traditionalist) in the third sentence you would have just as true a statement.

The core activity at elite sports academies, especially for creative-type sports (soccer, basketball, etc.) is not DI with I do-we do-you do. It is *playing*. Not unstructured play, but play carefully structured to repeatedly create certain kinds of challenges with the idea that learning to overcome these challenges increases both skill and in-game problem solving capacity.

Rondos, small sided games, multi-goal games, games with restrictions or rules on in place normally, 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v2 drills are all examples of this.

Skill drilling is also an important part of most of these programs, but it is not the majority. Direct instruction on technique is also part of them but less and less so after the initial novice stage (and most of these schools do not have novices, even those with 10 year old kids)

Structured play practices do a few important things. One, of course, they promote motivation and fun, which is important if you are training 2x per day, as often happens. Two, they follow the interleaving and varied practice principal. But most importantly, they recognize that no coach can artificially predict and drill the exact scenario that will happen in a game, so the best thing to do is face many novel but similar scenarios so you can use those to attack the novel problems that do arise. It is basically George Polya. It also calls to mind Dewey (maligned in a comment) who wrote about the importance of carefully designed learning environments (such as the ones designed by, say, Pep Guardiola)

So I agree that sports are not only a great metaphor but a great model to use and learn from. But what we choose to emphasize from their varied practices often says more about us than it does about them.

[MartinCothran @MartinCothran]

Athletics is a great metaphor for education. Unfortunately, it's often not taken far enough. The fact is that no coach (at least not one who wants to be successful) would dare run a sports program the way many romanticist educational theorists try to run a school.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

What's your view on the Anderson and Krathwohl update to Blooms Taxonomy? I know Bloom is sort of persona non grata right now on both sides but I find their breakdown of types of knowledge really helpful (if imperfect to my mind). Your understanding vs skills vs facts is basically the same separation as theirs (they add metacognition, though that seems non-MECE to my McKinsey brain) so your presentation made me think of it.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@MartinCothran @mathillustrated I was really excited to sign onto twitter after work today and see 18 comments on this post. Then I read them, and I learned less than I had hoped.

So, can I ask you both: what do you think of what I wrote there? Do you agree or disagree? And am I missing something important?

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@rpondiscio This sounds a lot like John Dewey!

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@mathillustrated @learnwithmrlee I didn't see the post you're referring to, but doing that is the opposite of progressive pedagogy!

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@dylanwiliam @arotherham @ToddTruitt76508 @RTDNEWS What test is this? Am I right to read these as essay questions?

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

One thing the Trump 1 and Biden eras taught me is that being President is not as hard as all the movies and TV shows make it seem.

First we had a clear lunatic with no public sector experience and business expertise thst had bankrupted multiple can't-fail businesses, who preferred to golf every day rather than do his job. And things were...mostly fine? (until his mishandling of a pandemic killed thousands and thousands of people, but we can ignore that for the sake of argument)

Then a clearly cognitively impaired person became president, and he did...even better! The US recovery was the best on earth, real wages grew, unemployment fell, inequality lessened. But people were angry, in part because it just doesnt feel good to have a dementia patient running rhe country.

So, my conclusion was that it must just not be that hard. I wouldn't hire either of these people, at this stage in their lives, to run a lemonade stand, but things kept going kinda okay.

This administration is different, but I remain convinced that a random deaf-mute hospital-bound octogenarian would have been more effective than the current administration in improving the lives of the American people.

[Jay Kloppenberg @JayKloppenberg]

@jbarro @asymmetricinfo Thid makes sense in theory, but reality, sadly, does not match it
What moralistic rules exactly is talerico trying to impose on people? Because I haven't heard of a single one.

He's Christian and American and believes in the (related) ideals of both. What's the problem?