CRITICAL OBSERVATION #2 Disequilibrium in the Construction of Knowledge This day, students were working on a problem called Lots of Squares.

As a class, the students had already concluded that any starting square could be divided into 1, 4, 7, or 9 smaller squares. However, it remained uncertain whether or not a starting square could be divided into any other number of smaller squares. I put a list on the board that looked something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ! Y ? ? Y ? ? Y ? Y ? ? ? 83!

Alright everyone, we are going to take five minutes to discuss these in your groups. At the end of that five minutes, each group will send one member to the board to share a finding, idea, or question. After five minutes, I asked groups to start sharing what they discussed. A few groups produced results that the rest of the class agreed with and they started to chisel away at the remaining question marks on the list. Then we came to Andrews group. We can do 5, Andrew said confidently. Show us, I replied. Andrew comes to the front and draws this figure:

The class thinks on this for a while. Wait says Avery from across the room, I dont think all of those smaller ones are squares. Yeah they are. No.waitno, theyre not Avery says more surely now. Imagine the original square was 3x3. Then, when we divide it up in your way, the ! 84!

dimensions for the smaller pieces wouldnt be the same on both sides like a square. Avery comes up to the board and shows everyone what he means.

After some thought, the class, including Andrew, agree that Averys argument proves that 5 smaller squares cannot be created this way. It seemed to me that the class was fairly convinced that 5 smaller squares was impossible. I thank Andrew for engaging us in an interesting conversation and we keep going. The class continued and students continued to discuss and make progress. As the class ended and students were on their way out that day, I overheard Andrew talking to a classmate. I really want to find a different size starting square that will make my drawing for 5 work, he said. The comment caught me by surprise. Despite a fairly clear and convincing argument from a classmate, Andrew was still searching for ways to preserve his previous mental model.

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MAKING CONNECTIONS There were a few reasons the incident that day stood out to me. It provided insight into the way the human mind constructs knowledge. It made me aware of the ways in which school mathematics and our intentions as teachers can sometimes become a threat to student agency. It encouraged me to think about ethical ways of working with students, ways that attended critically to both the mathematics of students and to the preservation of their mathematical agency. The Human Mind and the Construction of Knowledge I interpreted Andrews ideas about his drawing and his reluctance to change his mind to be evidence of a constructivist view on the development of knowledge. The work of Piaget and others has helped develop the radical constructivist epistemology (Glasersfeld, 1995), which relies heavily on the ideas of mental equilibrium, cognitive conflict, assimilation and accommodation. Although this is a gross oversimplification, those four elements work together in the formation of new knowledge. Each individual is believed to develop a way of knowing their world that has proved viable, or consistent, with their experience. This state of being can be viewed as mental equilibrium; an individuals way of knowing is believed by them to be accurate and true because it has held up as reliable in their existence and there ! 86!

has been no counterexample to cause them to think otherwise. For Andrew, this is evidenced by his confidence in his drawing of the five smaller squares. My observations of him indicate that he had established that as a valid answer to the problem being posed. From a constructivist perspective, the potential for learning occurs when an individual encounters a mental perturbation (Steffe, 1990) and is placed into a state of cognitive conflict. Their existing mental model is now confronted in a way that causes them to recognize an inconsistency between their way of knowing the world and the way they are now experiencing it. As Avery responded to the drawing that Andrew had suggested to the class, it became clear that Andrew was becoming aware of the conflict that now existed for him. When we are faced with such cognitive conflict, a humans natural tendency is to find a way to restore our mental equilibrium. We do that through some combination of assimilation and accommodation. We can choose to assimilate the new information by finding a way to make it fit into our existing mental framework or we can accommodate by restructuring the mental framework itself. Andrew appears to have returned himself to a state of mental equilibrium by acknowledging that a 3x3 starting square will not subdivide into five smaller squares but by leaving open the possibility that there may exist some size starting square that will work. ! 87!

School Mathematics as a Threat to Student Agency Andrews case is fascinating because of the way it demonstrates the tenacity with which many people hold on to their ideas. As Eleanor Duckworth points out, the basic point is how difficult it is to change what people think or feel about something simply by telling them or even showing them something different (2006). Strict standards and accountability have encouraged schools to force students to adopt, or at least mimic, very specific ways of thinking and knowing. As I think is evidenced above, this type of lock step marching through standards is not rooted in a realistic view of how people learn. This often comes at the expense of student identity. When we are forced to adopt a way of thinking that we do not view as our own, we begin to question the validity of our own thinking in that arena. By consequence, when we do not trust our own ways of thinking as valid, we surrender our willingness to act. We surrender our agency. To possess all the world of knowledge and lose ones own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion (Dewey, 1902). IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING An Ethical View on Working With Students All of this presents the educator with a bit of a paradox. If people hold tightly to their own ways of knowing and if pressuring change ! 88!

comes at the expense of student agency, then how is a teacher to ethically educate the student? Some well-known philosophers in education have interesting insight to a more ethical form of work between teacher and student. The way to move a persons thoughts and feelings is not by trying to excise them and replace them with other thoughts and feelings. Rather, it is to try to understand the persons thoughts and feelings, and to work from there. It means having the person articulate his or her own thoughts in different areas and in different ways and see where they run into conflict with themselves (Duckworth, p.118, 2006). A particular modification of a mathematical concept cannot be caused by a teacher any more than nutriments can cause plants to grow. Nutriments are used by the plants for growth but they do not cause plant growth. Teachers are constrained in specifying what they place in the students zone of potential development by what the students make from their experiences in particular mathematical learning environments (Steffe, p.392, 1990). Both Duckworth and Steffe acknowledge and are operating under the realization that teachers cannot cause a student to learn what they intend to teach. Mental change can only come about as a result of some mental adaptation that the individual makes in attending to his or her own cognitive conflict. As is clearly demonstrated in Andrews case, that adaptation is not always what we, as an observer, might have interpreted or intended. ! 89!

The teacher can ethically respond to this dilemma, I believe, by listening to the thoughts of students, interpreting them based on the knowledge that the teacher possesses, and using that to determine what environment or problem situation might allow the student to see where their own ideas run into conflict with themselves. In starting with the ideas of the student, as opposed to the ideas of the curriculum, the teacher can help students to build mathematical ideas while also helping students retain mathematical identity and agency. Students may come to see mathematical ideas as rooted in their own thinking, not as an imposition from the outside. What Does it Look Like? It can be difficult to imagine what this type of interaction with students and their ideas might look like in a classroom. I will use an example to illustrate what it might look like, but I do so with hesitation. Part of the difficulty with the approach is that there really is no script for how to proceed; it relies largely on what students are doing, how the teacher interprets those actions as representing the mathematical ways of knowing of their students, and how the teacher might use their own mathematical way of knowing to determine a potentially beneficial next step. As part of a unit on ideas of chance, probability, and expected value, my students were working on a problem called The ! 90!

Counters Game from the Interactive Mathematics Program Year 1 unit The Game of Pig (Figure 3.1). FIGURE 3.1 The Counters Game (Task)

We played the game a few times so that students could develop some intuitive ideas about which spots might be best to place their markers. There were a few different initial ideas. Some students picked a single spot as best based on how the first few games went (Figure 3.2), some started to formulate intuitive ideas about probability (Figure 3.3), and some identified a grouping of spaces that seemed to be best (Figure 3.4).

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FIGURE 3.2 Single Space

FIGURE 3.3 Intuitive Probability

FIGURE 3.4 Group of Spaces

We eventually got to talking and debating about what the best strategy would be. We had previously developed some ideas about experimental and theoretical probabilities, so students started wondering what the theoretical probabilities for each sum (2-12) would be and how we might use those in developing a best strategy. So, they got to work on calculating the theoretical ! 92!

probabilities, which is when a controversy started brewing. In identifying the space of equally likely outcomes, some students felt that there would be 36 different equally likely outcomes (Figure 3.5) and some students felt that there would be 21 (Figure 3.6). FIGURE 3.5 Carly (36 outcomes)

As evidenced by the work sample, students in this camp thought that 1+2 should be counted as a distinct outcome from 2+1. You can see this in the work sample where Carly has written 12 and 21 in the column labeled 3. Students in this group said things like if we had a blue die and a white die, we could get a sum of three two different ways. We could get a two on the blue die and a one on the white die OR we could get a one on the blue die and a two on the white die.

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You can see the probabilities, written as fractions, that Carly has circled here to indicate the probability of rolling each sum (2-12). For the sake of clarity, I have also converted those to percentages. 2 2.8 % 3 5.6 % 4 8.3 % 5 % 6 % 7 % 8 % 9 % 10 8.3 % 11 5.6 % 12 2.8 %

11.1 13.9 16.7 13.9 11.1

As I mentioned, not all students thought this was correct. Others believed that there were only 21 equally likely outcomes, and this changed the resulting theoretical probabilities quite a bit. FIGURE 3.6 Gabi (21 outcomes)

In contrast to the other group, this camp of students felt that 1+2 and 2+1 was the SAME outcome and, therefore, should not be counted as two different ones. Their argument was that it didnt matter which die showed which number. The result was the same and so they should not be counted separately. You can see in her ! 94!

work above that Gabi has included 12 as a possibility but not 21. You can also see that she has expressed the resulting theoretical probability for each sum (2-12), which I have recopied below for ease of comparison with the other group. 2 4.8 % 3 4.8 % 4 9.5 % 5 9.5 % 6 14.3 % 7 14.3 % 8 14.3 % 9 9.5 % 10 9.5 % 11 4.8 % 12 4.8 %

We had two groups of students, each convinced that their way made sense. How is a teacher to navigate this? One option might be for the teacher to tell students which way they believe is right. This is problematic because it sets the teacher up as the epistemological authority and half of the students (the ones whose thinking was just invalidated by the teachers stance) would likely be left thinking that mathematics doesnt make sense, that mathematics runs against their own ways of thinking, and, consequently, that their thinking must not be mathematical. Instead, as mentioned above by Eleanor Duckworth, I think my role was to help put students in situations where their ideas naturally run into conflict with one another and, thus, resolution comes from them. I proposed that we run a HUGE experiment with lots of trials to see how the experimental probabilities played out in the long run. The students helped design an experiment that we could use and we went to work. After over 3,000 trials across my three classes, we came up with some interesting results (Figure 3.7). ! 95!

FIGURE 3.7 Experimental Results

Down the center of the image you can see the row created for each sum (2-12). To the immediate right of that is the number of times that each sum came up in our experimental trials. To the right of that is the experimental probability for each sum expressed as a percentage. Comparatively, to the immediate left of center are the theoretical probabilities for the out of 21 group and to the left of that are the theoretical probabilities for the out of 36 group.

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I had students discuss and compare our experimental results with the two proposed theoretical models to decide on which they thought was correct. Many groups decided that the out of 36 model seemed to be most correct. However, there were still some students in the class who continued to side with the out of 21 model (citing reasons like not enough trials and the unavoidable discrepancy between theoretical and experimental probabilities). At this point, I decided to let us settle there. There had been lots of opportunities for students to test the viability of their ideas about chance as it related to the game. By now, most had settled where they were going to settle. It did not appear that there was any perceived disequilibrium on the part of students, no cognitive conflict left to resolve. From my perspective as a constructivist, this means there is no longer space where learning can occur. It is difficult to leave things here, but I think we should. SUMMING IT UP Almost everything about our school system and our public belief about schooling runs against many of the ideas I suggest here. Standards indicate the existence of some universal knowledge, standardized testing and accountability have created a sort of binary outlook on knowing and learning, and the common perception is that a good teacher gets that stuff into the heads of their students. I would suggest a slightly different view on each item. ! 97!

We cannot reduce knowing to a binary, black or white system. Even more modern systems of assessment and grading in schools that are based on mastery seem to indicate that there is some finish line or some final, finished way of knowing that is possible to achieve. I prefer to think of knowing in terms of the constructivist notion of viability. As such, our knowing is not finished, but rather becomes more nuanced as we gain more experience with our thoughts and our world. I think Marilyn Frankenstein reorients us nicely when she writes, Because of the unity between subjectivity and objectivity, people cannot completely know particular aspects of the world no knowledge is finished. As humans change, so does the knowledge they produce. But, through constant searching and dialogue, we can continually refine our understanding in the sense that we can act more effectively (1983, p. 316). This sort of stance also encourages us to rethink the universal knowledge that is embodied in the standards documents and curriculum maps. Knowledge is personal and, I think, a representation of both the individual and the society in which that knowledge is created. More simply, mathematical knowledge cannot exist independent of the human mind. Perhaps more than anything, this constructivist outlook on learning and knowing seems to provide a more ethical way of working with students, particularly as it relates to fostering and preserving their ! 98!

mathematical agency. It provides a model for thinking about how people make sense of their world in a personal, natural way without the imposition of others. As counterintuitive as it might sound, we cannot actually teach anyone mathematics. That would be a regression to the belief that knowledge is somehow transmitted from one person to another. By contrast, I think teachers can create environments where students can engage in learning mathematics. Learning is a construction by the individual and that kind of mental change can only come from within.

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