Equitable Teaching Reflection: How do we find and feature all students’ competence? (EQ2)

Looking back on my original posts about this essential question (found here, here, and here), I see a few major themes. The first and easiest way to find and feature student competence is to treat them like competent human beings. Especially when looking with a deficit lens, teachers often think their students don't have much to offer. After all, they're just kids, right? If they haven't learned about something, how can they know about it? But in reality, students know a lot about the world around them, and it's our job as teachers to pull out their knowledge and show them what it means and how it applies. In Houssart's 2001 piece "Rival Classroom Discourses and Inquiry Mathematics: 'the Whisperers,'" students who have been tracked to a low level due to their previous performance are profiled. The author describes a few students in the class as 'whisperers,' students who often make side remarks in response to classroom happenings. As she learns more about them, Houssart notes the brilliance behind the remarks and the competence in the whisperers that is just waiting to be uncovered. Because the teacher is viewing the students through a deficit lens, believing their position as low-status math learners means they do not have the knowledge, he is unable to find the competence that these whispering students already have. If their teacher had simply believed in them and asked them to share their thoughts, the classroom could have turned into a place where student voices were valued, heard, and affirmed. Instead, the teacher was the sole authority and all other voices were reduced to whispers. 

That concept of bringing student voice into the classroom can be such an easy way to find and feature competence. In fact, Reinhart suggested in 2000 to "Never Say Anything A Kid Can Say" (this reading was from Practicum, rather than this class) and Chapin, O'Connor, and Anderson suggested ways to reaffirm our students' contributions through revoicing and repeating in the 2009 book Classroom Discussions: Using Math Talk to Help Students Learn. I hold onto my stance from the earlier blog posts that never is a bit too strong of a word, but striving to let the students do the talking and driving as much as possible is a philosophy I am definitely walking away with. Student voice in the classroom helps foster an environment where everyone is poised to learn from each other and hopefully from the world around them instead of relying on the teacher to "give" them the information they need to know. That banking model has been looked down upon by education scholars as well. Education and learning thrive on authentic discovery and personal motivation. Listening to me drone on and on about how to find x is not something I'd want to listen to, and I do not think I would get anything out of it, so why should I expect my students to? The more student voices are heard, the more perspectives students are able to hear about a topic as well. Math has countless solution paths and ways to think about numbers, and I know I will never be able to come up with them all myself in order to introduce the way that might just "click" for a student who is struggling. As student voices become normalized in our classroom culture, students will be listening to and learning from each other, therefore hearing all kinds of new and different ways of thinking.

Talk about prioritizing student voice and allowing all students to share their thoughts can be worrisome when you remember that sometimes students are incorrect. But the thing is, we need to reframe "incorrect" and what it means in our classrooms. The idea that you actually need to make mistakes in order to learn is something that can be of value here. As I said in my original blog post, "doing a problem the "wrong" way often teaches us way more about the problem than getting it correct the first time." I am still worried about students sometimes latching onto solutions that will not bring them to a correct answer, but I would rather have a bit of that risk and be able to teach them that mistakes are valuable and important than my students only ever learn one or two ways to tackle a problem and feel like messing up is always bad. With this, I also think about teaching methods and what they mean for our students. With the whisperers from Houssart's piece, the whispering students were clearly not being served by their teacher's teaching style. If that teacher changed their style to something with more student voice, would other students be left out and gain the status of those whisperers? This stands as a reminder to continually reevaluate teaching styles and methods over the course of a school year, but I'll talk more about this in essential question #3, found here.

When thinking specifically about the all in finding and featuring all students' competence, I think about ways to ensure I am spreading the love when calling on students to ask for and use their ideas. A great way to develop involvement of all students is with group work, specifically group work where group members all have specific roles. Throughout formal schooling, we have all likely experienced "that group member," the one that does not contribute or participate in any of the work. By giving specific roles, the hope is that students will develop interdependence and all students will therefore have to participate in order to produce a result. Obviously, not every situation can be fixed with something like this, but it's a good effort, and it can be coupled with drop-in observations to help encourage the process. Since students are only competing with a handful of students for air time in small groups, this means a lot more students get to have their voices heard compared to a whole class discussion. Additionally, working in a small group has the potential to reduce the social risk for students. If they only have to worry about three or four students hearing a "wrong" answer instead of thirty, they might be more likely to risk the potential humiliation of. being incorrect. Aside from group work, I might consider wait time and documenting student responses as ways of shaking up the voices heard. By focusing more on delaying responses and who has already contributed, I can call upon the students who are usually overshadowed by the frequent contributors. Lengthening wait time allows more students to develop an answer and the confidence to respond. Documenting responses allows me to take the randomization of cold-calling with popsicle sticks or another random method but take the fear of cold-calling out of it. Combined with wait time, I'll have even more of a handle on who responds most or least often by documenting voices, therefore knowing who I need to include more in the conversation.