Random Thought After Staring At Spectacular Art Today

Vincent Van Gogh is far and away my favorite artist. I was lucky enough to spend a couple hours in a great exhibit about his work today in Washington DC. And while I was awestruck by Van Gogh’s ability to make meaningful images from such disparate colors - the way I always am when I look at his work - I left the exhibit with another thought.

As most folks know, Van Gogh struggled with some form of mental illness his entire life. Despite his widely acknowledged brilliance today, he sold only ONE painting during his lifetime.

As I rewandered through the exhibit a second time, I wondered how many kids sneak through two years in my class with underappreciated - or even worse unknown - genius. I know that number is lower now than it is in the past, but as I near the end of a two year loop, I hope that number is zero.

Foolish I know, but hey - it doesn’t hurt to dream, right? Because none of us want to miss out on the possible genius of our students.

Flipped History GHO

I got to hang out with David Fouch, Tom Driscoll, Jason Bretzmann, George Phillip, Kaelyn Bullock, and Kenny Bosch on Wednesday and talk all things flipping history.

We shared some ideas about new things that we were trying in our classrooms, new tech tools, and conference plans for the new year. It had been a while since we had gotten a chance to chat, and it was a blast. The archived hangout is embedded below if you want to check it out.

Student-Driven Class Backfires

Soooooo. That whole Socratic seminar as a final thing.

Great idea, right? Give kids 1.5 years of preparatory Socratic seminars in both my history class and their English class. Teach sentence frames for agreeing with and adding on to comments, respectfully disagreeing, and welcoming people into the conversation. Talk a lot about evidence-based claims. And give kids space to talk about ideas with increasingly long intervals of time available to them. What could possibly go wrong?

Funny you should ask.

I was talking to a friend about this final and reflecting on how things went down during it. Their response: “You’ve got to blog this.” Yes. True. Great point. Here it is.

See, here’s the thing about making conscious choices about getting out of your students’ way in class: sometimes, things go south. And it isn’t pretty.

I witnessed a massacre of a Socratic seminar in one of my classes. Students spun quickly away from the core ideas of the Socratic, ideas they had spent a week researching and understanding. And finding evidence to back up possible claims that they might make.

And in this Socratic? Claims were made, all right. But evidence to back up these claims? Not so much.

Someone decided that they should moderate the Socratic: give people the space to speak and affirm their ideas. Nope. Bad idea.

It was trainwreck. Clearly the big question coming out of this though: what did I learn for next time?

In no particular order:

Sometimes when you get out of your students’ way, it doesn’t work. Sometimes it goes wrong. If you take risks, be ready to get burned. (Actually, that is a takeaway from my whole semester, but I digress.)

Know when to step in. I clearly struggle with this. A couple years ago I had a Socratic seminar go south and I stepped in forcefully. Which was a mistake. As I watched this particular Socratic go south this year, that memory was in the fore of my mind. “Stay out of this. Let them dig themselves back to the big ideas they are ready to talk about.” Well, that never happened. Clearly, this approach didn’t work this time.

Find a way to keep kids more conscious of their conversation. Metacognition would have helped here. But being metacognitive during a quickly-flowing discussion can be tough to do…