This post is part of a series on soft skills in math teaching incubated and curated by Riley. This conference pushed me and several others over the edge into blogging. My first post went up a week ago, and a couple days ago I got my very first comment (thank you, Ben!), which not only baptised me into Net 2.0 but also provided the grist for today’s post. Ben wrote:
Again, communicate (body language, tone of voice, and out loud if you have to) that class isn’t moving on without a good answer here. This is the key to everything. They have to know that if they don’t turn their brain back on, everybody is going to sit there awkwardly till they do. (This can be tricky if there are management issues, but these need to be addressed on their own terms. If the kids can’t maintain decorum in the face of a thought-provoking question that they don’t know how to answer at first, the cognitive demand on them is not where the problem lies.)
There are a number of different ways students may not maintain decorum in the face of a question they don’t know how to answer at first, but the one I dread most is the Soft Mutiny. Perhaps you did not encounter the soft mutiny during your student teaching year, or maybe you’ve forgotten what it feels like. Driving into quicksand? Stepping off the drop-off in the pool at age 6? Outward signs are (a) no open disrespect (that would be a Hard Mutiny), (b) complete refusal by most of the class to answer questions, pick up a pencil, or do anything but look at you and shrug, and (c) a complete closure of all lines of communication between you and the class.
In the 200 or so class periods I taught during my student year I encountered perhaps 6-10 soft mutinies. Some combination of circumstances or moves on my part caused the room to transform without warning from a reasonably happy, functioning class into a place where students not only were completely lost but were also unable to say to me “We’re completely lost.” Or perhaps it’s “we’re writing you off, and we’re not going to bother to tell you that.” Possible causes of soft mutinies: I’ve inadvertently said something disrespectful, or I’ve given the impression that they “should” know something they don’t, or the question/topic I’ve posed strikes them not just as irrelevant, but appalinglly irrelevant. Or, or, or. The non-communicative aspect of the soft mutiny makes it hard to know just what’s going on.
At first I tried to just keep going. That didn’t work. (The driving-into-quicksand analogy is helpful here.) Next I went on the theory that they just needed to be shown again what to do. That didn’t work either. (Think backing out of the quicksand and driving right back into it.)
On subsequent occasions I tried to open the lines of communication: “Have I lost you? What’s going on?” I was surprised to learn that that didn’t work either. I realized over time that if students were lost and feeling discouraged by that, the last thing they wanted to do was talk about it, and if they were upset (with me, with something else), they expressed their mild hostility as “don’t expect us to help you fix this.” Asking them to write instead didn’t work: students had turned uncooperative, and to write when I asked them to would be cooperating.
Actually, over the course of the year, as relationships all around got stronger, the “what’s going on?” approach did start to work. One or two students would break the ice and give me a hint about how they were seeing things. And along those lines, the better we all knew each other, the less often soft mutinies seemed to happen at all, which is the key to prevention.
So what is the best response to a soft mutiny? I haven’t mastered it, but I believe there are some key components:
- Don’t take it personally. If I got upset, it got worse (think stepping on the gas while in quicksand.)
- Ask the students “What would be most helpful for you now?” This gives students input and control without forcing them to voice their own sense of being lost, or, if they’re mad at me or feel I’m doing poorly, without forcing them to say things they think might upset me or hurt me. This question got useful answers that moved the class forward about 50% of the times I asked it.
- If that question gets no response, then make a transition to another mode, activity, or task. Acknowledge that “This isn’t working. Let’s shift to a different approach altogether.” This gives everyone a way to leave behind the “stuck” feeling. I don’t always have Plan B in my back pocket, and one doesn’t always occur to me when I need it, but it seems to be key to getting out from under soft mutinies.
One happy observation is that, although I’ve spent the night following every soft mutiny in despair for my relationship with my students and for my career, the next day students have arrived in a completely different state, as if the soft mutiny never happened.
As mentioned, these got less frequent as we got to know each other. My aim next year is to prevent these entirely. What are some ways to help kids learn to express, in appropriate ways, when they are feeling shut down or turned off?
I’m still unclear as to your circumstances; is this where you are asking a question but unable to get a response from any student? Usually I find a choice by randomizer (by, for example, Popsicle sticks with student names) to be a fair enough nudge to get a student talking.
Sometimes I need to prompt with a Socratic question or two, but that’s very particular on circumstance. Could you give a more specific example?
I usually avoid general expect-a-random-hand-to-raise situations altogether unless it’s a discussion that’s already rolling.
Glad to have stumbled upon your blog! Was actually directed here from a Teaching and Learning listserve. Like your perspective, and while I teach elementary students recognize those soft mutiny aspects in other social constructs.
Keep blogging!
I would tend to agree with Jason. I like to focus on preventing this type of standstill, by introducing the lesson with a common-point entry (ie. Dan Meyer’s ideas of WCYDWT or throwing an easy, related question at the students), and then pairing kids up to work on the more complicated parts. That way, the bulk of the learning they do is from each other and I only stand by to facilitate, and ideally when we have a more in-depth discussion later in the period, at least a couple of kids in the class would already have gained enough understanding to carry us forward. If I do find myself in a Soft Mutiny (or as I call them, standstill), I just ease up on the questioning and go with an easier question, to get the kids talking again.
I like having paired work before discussions, because I find that as I circulate and help kids reach an understanding of their work, I often pick up little tricks on how to break down the concept into smaller, more manageable chunks. And then, when I go over the concept as an entire class near the end of the period, I will have a better shot of doing so successfully.
@Jason and Mimi – The circs were an entire class going silent regardless of who was called on or what was asked. It was a rare event but, since it happened, important to recover from constructively. Prevention is of course the goal – I really like Mimi’s practice of not going into whole group discussions without first getting some info by circulating as students do a little pre-thinking together.
Hey Dan –
Psyched to have played a role in your baptism. (Wait – “Goldner” – bris?) Excited for your contribution.
Very insightful! I took way longer than 1 year to put this together. My instinctual move when things went awry in my classroom (“soft mutiny” or otherwise) was frequently to invite students to help me fix it, and I think it took me over 6 years to figure out that this is never really a good idea. If there is a whole-class management issue, odds are the kids feel a) a little unsafe / at least uncomfortable; and b) a little unhappy with the teacher / disappointed that things aren’t going better. As you say, the last thing they want in this state is to try to help us do our job. Don’t forget this lesson! It’s going to serve you well.
Thanks Ben for the encouragement. I actually think it is a good idea to invite kids to help fix it — but like everything else, they have to be taught how, by breaking that complex skill into simpler steps, and so on…
… and I don’t know how to do that — yet!
Hmmm, I see I was a little imprecise. Indeed, if we don’t invite the kids to help us fix it (in some way or other), it can’t possibly get fixed. (Since they are the biggest constituency in the problem itself.) I meant that in the moment things are going wrong, it’s generally not the move to ask the kids to help us think of how to fix it. The situation you described in the post made me think vividly of a moment I witnessed this year in a class I observed as a coach, which in turn made me think of a number of moments from my own teaching. I don’t know how accurate the comparison really is, but in the moments I’m thinking of, what happened was:
Some sort of rebellion was afoot, and the teacher turned to the class and said something to the effect of, “how can I get you to buy back in?”
Clearly this is a little different from what you described. What reminded me of it is what I perceived as the key to its ineffectiveness, which sounds a lot like what you wrote:
The kids are already unhappy and uncooperative. Why would they cooperate with you in getting them to cooperate?
The take-home lesson for me has been about recognizing that
a) I have an impulsive desire to treat the kids as equal partners in making the class happen, but that
b) in teaching it was necessary for me to take control of this desire because it ignored the very important inequality that stemmed from the fact that I was contractually obligated and paid to make the class happen and they were not.
It’s an awesome avenue of hands-on pedagogical research to experiment with ways of giving students more responsibility for the functioning of class. I’ve played with this, with mixed, but some very exciting, results. (Ask me about the group leaders thing if you’re interested.) But this entails a rewriting of the unspoken contract between you and your students, and you have to do contract negotiations before a situation arises that the contract is supposed to cover. In other words, if you haven’t already given kids a certain responsibility before there was a problem, you can’t dump it on them when class is going south and you can’t figure out how to fix it. The lesson for me was just that asking them for input in this situation was foisting extra responsibility on them for a situation that already felt out-of-control at a time when they already felt uncomfortable.
All this aside, really what I wanted to say was just to commend you on, and encourage you to keep, picking up on how students who are not cooperating with you might be feeling. This is what’s gonna serve you well.
Will do. Re: “Ask me about the group leaders thing”, how ’bout writing it up as a virtual conference on soft skills entry?
…. got other plans for that