06.14.13Guest Video Analysis: Joaquin Hernandez on “Rounding Up”
The best part of my job is this: On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, I get to sit a the big table on the 30th floor of TLAC Towers, far above the madding crowd… Just kidding. Our office looks out on a creek, a vegetable patch and a cemetery. We do have a second floor but it gets hot up there in the summer…
Anyway, I get to sit at the table and watch video of great teachers with a merry band of super smart people who like to geek out on teaching.
On Tuesdasy last the teacher in question was Joanna O’Byrne of King Solomon Academy in London. In the merry band was Joaquin Hernandez, formerly of TFA and unrepentant fan of LA Laker basketball. His analysis of how Joanna “wins” the battle all teachers face to make the kids do the work insted of doing it themselves was insightful, so I asked him to write it up . If you’re working on avoiding “Rounding Up” and “Tipping” read on.
Joaquin Hernandez on “Rounding Up” etc.
One of the biggest challenges that teachers face is ensuring students do as much of the cognitive work as possible when they respond to error. It’s so natural to want to “round up” students’ responses by turning their “good” answer into a “great” one to to give them too much of a hint to by asking a leading question. We call that “tipping” (e.g., “Is that an adverb or is it an adjective?”). As our team is keenly aware from leading workshops, it’s hard to avoid these tendencies even when you’re trying to.
But of course there aren’t many problems a great teacher can’t solve and we learned a lot about avoiding the tendency to “round up” watching a video of Joanna O’Byrne at ARK Schools’ King Solomon Academy in London. (ARK is a network of 18 charter-like schools in the U.K.). In one of our favorite clips, Joanna progresses through a sequence of questions to help her students identify the adverb in the sentence: “Elvis kicked the ball so aggressively that he smashed Ruskin’s bathroom window.”
We noticed approximately five times when Joanna might have rounded up but didn’t. We are sure there are more, but we thought it’d be useful to point out the ones that jumped out to us to get the conversation started.
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Video Transcript |
Ways she could’ve rounded up |
What she does instead |
| Joanna: “What is an adverb? Let’s remind ourselves. Bailey, you told me there. What is an adverb?”Bailey: “A describing word.”
Joanna: “It describes what though?” |
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| Bailey: “…what they’re doing.”Joanna. “Yeah. What they’re doing is the…”
Bailey: “Verb.” |
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| Joanna: “The verb, OK. The verb is the ‘doing’ word. So an adverb describes the verb.” (Joanna points to Bailey to repeat) Bailey: “An adverb describes a verb.”
Joanna: “An adverb describes a verb.” (Points to class to repeat) Class: “An adverb describes a verb!” Joanna: “So which is the adverb in this sentence…Amran?” Amran: “The adverb of the sentence is ‘aggressively.’” Joanna: “Well done, Amran. Because “aggressively” describes the verb. Which is the verb, Aisha?” Aisha: “The verb is ‘aggressively.’” Joanna: “Hmmm. We said that the adverb is aggressively because that describes the verb. What is a verb, Aisha?” |
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| Aisha: “The verb is the doing word.”Joanna: “So what is he doing in that sentence?” |
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| Aisha: “He kicked the ball.”Joanna: “So what is the verb in the sentence?”
Aisha: “The verb in the sentence is ‘kicked.’” Joanna: “Exactly!”
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Do you see any other ways she could have rounded up? What does she do instead? What else do you see her do that’s effective?
