"... students don't have misconceptions.

"
Here is an illustration of a very provocative argument.

Dan Meyer
17 3
Dec 16

Rochelle Gutierrez goes big in her introduction to Rehumanizing Mathematics for

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Students:

… students don’t have misconceptions. They have conceptions. And those

conceptions make sense for them, until they encounter something that no longer
works. They are only “misconceptions” when we begin with the expectation that
others need to come to our way of thinking or viewing the world.

I saw an illustration of Gutierrez’s quote in a lesson where a bunch of students had

been successfully graphing inequalities all morning until they crashed on a new one:
Over the last ten years, math education has done a top-shelf job destigmatizing
making mistakes and revealing misconceptions. But when teachers fixate on the idea
of a student having a misconception, even if to say that’s okay!, they are fixated on
what they themselves know. 

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Psychologist David Ausubel said, “The most important single factor influencing
learning is what a learner already knows.” So Gutierrez’s critique isn’t purely social
here; it’s also cognitive and pedagogical. Our teaching is less effective when we’re
focused on what we know and more effective when we focus on what students know.

What do these students likely know?

There is a connection between the inequality and the graph.

They both describe a bunch of solutions.

There is a critical point on the graph where solutions turn into not-solutions.

What I did next:

Gutierrez:

And those conceptions make sense for them, until they encounter something that no
longer works.

These students don’t have a misconception. They have a conception, an idea, that
whatever number is by itself on one side of an inequality, that’s the critical point.
They need to encounter something that helps them find the limits of that idea. It
works sometimes but they’ve overgeneralized it.
So as a class we evaluated x = 1 and convinced ourselves that it definitely works in the
inequality and the graph. I used my authority to herald the fact that this is a very good
thing, yea verily, these should match!

Then we evaluated x = 20 and convinced ourselves that it definitely works in the

graph but definitely not in the inequality where it produces the false statement 34 ≤
25. Then I asked students to discuss what they saw at their table, try again, and
people found a new path.

PD is PD

Something exciting and a little unnerving about Gutierrez’s quote up there is that it
applies equally to our classroom and our homes, our neighborhoods, our
communities, our entire social lives. Everyone whose behavior befuddles us in some
way—spouses, partners, friends, neighbors, etc—offers us the opportunity to either
focus on what we know and how we would have done it or to wonder why what
someone else did made sense to them and what we’ll need to do to develop a different
shared understanding. 

What I’m saying is that PD is also PD–professional development in teaching is

personal development in life. This is not true for many, many jobs on offer. But
because our work is social and very intensely personal, personal transformation
results in professional transformation and vice versa. I’d like this work to transform
me into a more loving, curious individual and my life to do the same for my teaching,
and starting with the conviction that “students don’t have misconceptions,” is one
such transformation.

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3 Comments

Write a comment…
 Dan Meyer Dec 17 Author

Gotcha - yeah. The feedback in that image isn't anything anyone outside this newsletter
sees FWIW.
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Kevin Hall Dec 17

I appreciate how this post calls for something that doesn't take up a lot of classroom
time. The first teaching book I ever read was Fred Jones (Tools for Teaching), and his take
was that feedback should identify the main thing the student did right, and then say, "The
next thing to do is..." Without dwelling on what they did wrong. I find it interesting to
consider how that technique is similar to & different from what you're talking about here.
You and Fred Jones are polar opposites in classroom style, but you have some
commonalities here.
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