Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. Fans of my blogs might remember the interview series that J.R. Wilson and Barry Garelick provided around their book, Traditional Math. I’m excited to bring you the voices behind this common sense approach to math instruction. In our chat, we talk about a wide range of topics, including…
1. Breaking Down Complex Concepts
2. Engagement in Math
3. Turn and Talk as a Strategy
4. Over-Obsession with Concepts
Listen and subscribe to Progressively Incorrect on…
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The podcast you’re listening to is sponsored by John Catt from Hachette Learning and hosted by Dr. Zach Groshell. John Catt publishes some of the best books in education, including Traditional Math, and the other book mentioned in the podcast, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.
You’re invited!
Finally, I wanted to invite you to some of the training events that I am putting on for Steplab in my role as the Director of Steplab North America. Check out my events page for more information, and let me know how I can help get you out to one of the fabulous cities that these training events are held in. See you there!
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Education Rickshaw 
Have you seen the turn and talks in Pritesh Raichura’s chemistry class in the Steplab video? If turn and talks can be short and effective in a chemistry class, they can be the same in a math class. They allow the students to change modes in recalling information from thinking to speaking. It’s not meant to be a conversation. Keep it short!
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That’s my view, but cool to hear these guys’ perspective.
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As I said in the interview, “If a teacher can use it, and it works, go for it!” I was not aware of the technique until recently, so I tended to go with what I knew.
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Wilson’s point near the end (I think it was Wilson) about concepts and just “solving the problem” left me cold. I want to teach math as a liberal art, a better way of being human, not just so my students can be efficient engineers for Musk and Altman. I’m guiltily hanging around the DI speakeasies because after banging my head against inquiry for eight years and watching my students just get less capable and no more interested in math, I’ve begun to think there’s something to the point that novices in a field learn differently from the way experts in that field think.
The bar on Engelmann’s Follow Through graph that most excites me is the one where DI got the highest marks for conceptual understanding. I want to know the teaching techniques that give kids of average intelligence, who don’t come from intellectually-engaged families, the best chance of, frankly, learning concepts. I highly suspect those techniques are other than the ones the establishment’s been flogging, but I have zero interest in my students becoming slavish calculators. And that’s what it sounded like Wilson was sort of fine with.
-jb
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