"Be Less Helpful" revisited

[Joshua Zucker]

Grant Wiggins is a great scholar of teaching, and he wrote a piece that says some great things about why we should be less helpful in our teaching.  The soccer practice analogy is deep and useful.

  http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/autonomy-and-the-need-to-back-off-by-design-as-teachers/

I'd love to hear your opinion on Wiggins's article, and especially any comments on ways you think you're too helpful and would like to change, and on ways you've already found to be less helpful and take away some of that scaffolding.

My original piece on "Be Less Helpful" was in our Math Teachers' Circular newsletter, Autumn 2012 issue -- scroll down a bit at http://www.mathteacherscircle.org/newsletter/MTCircular.html to find the newsletter in PDF or in an online format to read in your web browser.

Enjoy,

--Joshua

[Josh Dunnell]

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide.aspx?sid=2

 

How does the link (above) relate to what Wiggins is saying? Below is a quote from a portion of it.

 

“How to carry out this

recommendation

1. Ensure that instructional materials are

systematic and explicit. In particular, they

should include numerous clear models of

easy and difficult problems,”

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[Joshua Taton]

Hi, Joshua Z!

There was a recent article in The Detroit News that gave insight into how this might work in practice:

 http://www.detroitnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/201301031115/SCHOOLS/301030371

There is also a lot of what I believe to be good education research on this topic. From a somewhat philosophical and foundational standpoint (that of learning theory), Lave's and Wenger's work (1991) is particularly enlightening. I also believe that Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engstrom et al., 1999) provides a framework for thinking about the phenomenon of learning from this perspective. From a more practical standpoint, Chapin, O'Connor, and Anderson (2009) provides useful guidelines. Others to consider are Carpenter et al.'s (1993 / 2000) findings with "Cognitively-Guided Instruction" and Silver et al.'s (1996) with the "QUASAR Project." A lot of this type of work is in the tradition of Piaget and later Vygotsky. 

Thank you for posting and initiating the discussion! This is also a framework that we are refining and trying to apply in our Math Teachers' Circle!

Josh Taton

PhD Cand

University of Pennsylvania

Graduate School of Education

[Garske,Carla]

Thanks everyone for the articles and research. I have been thinking about this for some time now. I would like to know if anyone has come across any worthwhile video clips that help "show" what this looks like in practice, in a classroom, especially secondary math? I mentor beginning teachers and would love to have a way to share this with them besides reading about it.
Thanks!

Carla Garske
SC/SVNTP Mentor
831.479.3812 (h)
831.252.3812 (c)
________________________________
From: mathteach...@googlegroups.com [mathteach...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Joshua Taton [joshu...@joshuataton.com]
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 7:29 AM
To: mathteach...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [mathteacherscircle] Re: "Be Less Helpful" revisited

[Sean Corey]

Thank you so much for posting this article!  

-Carla

Have you checked out Polya's video "Let Us Teach Guessing"?  

Also, there are some good videos of teaching and doing math at the Max Ray Math Blog.  

Let me know if you find any other good videos.

Best,

Sean Corey

On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 11:33:51 AM UTC-5, Joshua Zucker wrote: