Jeff, my UM School of Education co-lecturer, sent me a link to a TEDxNYED video by California high school math teacher Dan Meyer, which focuses on “patient problem-solving.”

I was blown away for many reasons.

First, he quotes a director, David Milch, who says he only does period work — not sitcoms — because he feels that sitcoms wrap everything up too neatly and simplistically, and he thinks that impacts the brain.  He quotes:

“Impatience with irresolution.” Isn’t that mind-bending? Isn’t that exactly what we report seeing in students as they speed their way through Wikipedia-based research? Isn’t that sometimes what we identify in our colleagues and in one another when we have reticence in committing to a process rather than a product?

Next, he talks about how textbooks are taking away much of the student engagement in the process.  Over-scaffolding has taken away student curiosity and interest, so he rewrites the questions to take away some of the prompts so that students linger in the problem space for longer.  My co-author and I had similar thoughts when we wrote our science notebooking book: that one thing science notebooking does so well is keep kids in the problem space for longer.

This book was really hard to write, but I learned so much about how to ally our school libraries with rigorous inquiry work in non-humanities subjects.

But back to Dan Meyer … or, rather, to Einstein …

Aha! Again, the clear connection to the difficulty we have moving from “researching to find” to “researching to learn.”  It’s again why we need to stay in what Meyer might call the problem-creating phase or what we might call the questioning or wondering phase.  Figuring out what the issue is based on what we know or are learning? That’s much more important than plugging in answers. 

Are we too focused on answers?

Next, what struck me was that we librarians often get in a rather myopic zone and think that we’re the only ones in the building doing this kind of cognitive heavy lifting. But wow - imagine sitting in the lounge with this guy at lunch and what you’d learn.  (Well, you probably wouldn’t be sitting … or in the lounge.  You’d probably be designing some kind of lesson. Watch the video and you’ll see what I)

And finally, I realize that I haven’t really thought much about math instruction lately. I watched a great, free Deborah Ball Webinar a few months ago (highly recommended), but other than that, it’s been a pretty math-free world for me lately. Which probably means I could have been doing more to support math in my building.

This is a must-view video for all of us.  Dweck’s research probes the perils of empty praise and reinforces much of what the AASL Standards tell us about building students’ dispositions and self-assessment skills.  Don’t miss this or Dweck’s book, Mindset.

One of her key ideas is that we have a responsibility to help students develop a growth mindset (in which students believe that they are on a continuum of growth and can continue to build skills and expertise) instead of a fixed mindset (in which students believe their intelligent is pre-determined and cannot change, as in, “I’m smart, so I should know how to do this, and I can’t, so I’m frustrated” or, “I’m dumb, so that’s why I don’t get this - I give up.”)

Her work is so, so powerful, especially for those of us who work in upper middle-class environments in which there is some pressure to demonstrate “good parenting” or “supportive teaching” by praising — or over-praising — our students.

View it here.