We’re studying data in my third grade class. My students as a whole came in with vague notions of the meaning of data (“it’s information”) and some kids were confused as to what this all has to do with math anyway. On an initial dataset, kids mostly categorized things by their superficial features (“restaurants go together”) instead of grouping data more purposely in order to answer particular questions. Their descriptive language was mostly limited to “most” and “least”, and the questions they posed reflected that.
OK, that’s the preamble.
The main task today related to a survey that we took of our class. The survey was titled “Places where we like to...”, and we collected information about where everybody in the class likes to do various things. So: “Places where we like to read.” “Places where we like to visit.” “Places where we like to eat.” etc.*
* (The full lesson plan is here, at the bottom of the piece.)
Anyway, a pair of kids were organizing the class’ data on “Places where we like to read.” This was the data set they were organizing:
- School
- In my room, in bed
- Public library
- Home, in bed
- Library
- In the living room in my house
- My bed
- bed
- Home
- Home
- Home
- In my bed with the puppy
Group 1:
- School
- Public library
- library
- In my room, in bed
- Home, in bed
- In the living room in my house
- My bed
- bed
- Home
- Home
- Home
- In my bed with the puppy
“This one [on the left] are places for education.”
I was excited by this, because up until this point it had been very difficult for the students to see any other possible organizations of the data that didn’t just categorize their surface features. Actually, this was their second attempt at organizing the dataset, and their first had been fairly typical: all the “home” was grouped together, all the “bed”s were grouped together, “school” was alone, “library”s were together, etc.
In other words, I thought that I was watching a moment of learning, where the kids saw what we mean by organizing data to answer different questions.
So, I continued probing: “Got it. And what’s the other category?” I pointed to the right grouping.
Student A: “This cateogry is in my room, in bed, and also in the living room...”
Student B: “In home, a bunch are in home...”
The kids continued to trip over each other in an attempt to fully characterize their second category. I saw this as evidence that they recognized the insufficiency of their categorization, but lacked the language to properly describe it.
This, I recognized, was a perfect opportunity to tell them something.
I said: “Oh, so this category on the left are the places where education happens. And this, on the right, these are not places of education.”
Student A: “Yeah like a home or ...”
I continued: “So you might say that this category is places of education, and this category is places of non-education. Did I get your categorization right?”
The kids nodded. One of them repeated the categories using this new language, and then later used it when I brought the class over to look at the categorization that this pair had made.
I think this was a time when directly telling was able to cause learning. I’d generalize this by saying that when kids are searching for a term and can’t find it, that’s an opportunity for causing learning by directly telling. I’d also argue that you can cause learning by engineering these sorts of moments.
Questions:
- Do you think the language of "direct telling" is appropriate for
- Are you convinced that this was an appropriate time for direct telling?
- What parts of this post helped you feel like I wasn't bamboozling you in my representation of what happened in class?
- Were there moments while reading when you found yourself wishing you could have seen this moment? Where in the post were those moments?