This is what’s on my mind these days. All the time. I don’t just teach math, I teach other subjects too, but my math classroom holds a special place in my heart as an educator. (Hence the name of this blog). Right now, I’m knee deep in exploring the intersection between inquiry classrooms and mathematics classrooms.
Right now, I don’t really have a solid idea of how these two things go together, although I’d describe my mathematics classroom as an inquiry mathematics classroom. True inquiry involves the exploration of passions, interests and curiosities, as stated by Trevor Mackenzie in his book Dive into Inquiry. But what does this look like in a mathematics classroom? How do we let student interests guide mathematics learning? Is that even possible?
I wonder if my version of inquiry, as part of my mathematics classroom, is to narrow, or too broad, or just a different thing. Let me tell you about my mathematics classroom, and you can be the judge.
Learning starts with play and provocation. We investigate photo, an idea, a problem, that invites students to engage with the learning in some way, asking my two favourite questions: What do you notice? and What do you wonder? Student questions guide the learning that happens, and we come back to these questions at the end of the consolidation phase. Next, we explore a related problem — I try to look for mathematics that is worth doing, worth talking about –a rich task that will be a challenge. Students are invited to engage and explore, and instruction is provided at the time when they realize they need it. Sometimes this mean individualized learning, sometimes this means pausing the class and teaching in the middle of the problem. Either way, we work until we get to a spot where we’re ready for instruction.
After this, we look for patterns and propose different conjectures. Does this work all the time? Are there other problems like this we can try out? What do we think is happening here? What other learning can we connect to? These are key questions in my classroom. And we look for ways that we have addressed wonderings and noticings from the start of the lesson.
Lastly, I believe in purposeful, intentional practice. Someone on twitter commented that classwork without feedback is busy work, and I believe that too. Feedback takes on a lot of different forms in my classroom — conversation, notes on the side of a page as students are working, comparing work to solution exemplars for self-assessment, and sometimes even just answer keys. All of these are feedback on student learning. And this is where and how my lessons wrap up — we go back to our essential questions and wonderings — what did we find out? How is this connected to our initial provocation?
Is this an inquiry classroom? I think it is a form of inquiry, but is it true inquiry? Can we have a true ‘free inquiry’ in mathematics classrooms? This is what I wonder.
(As an aside, I’ll be leading a workshop where I explore some of these ideas more on April 25th at 4pm….feel free to drop by!)
The Learning Lab 