Student-Centered or Pedagogy-Centered?

In my second year teaching I received a piece of feedback I still think about. I was using number talks as a daily warmup, asking students to use mental math to make estimations, compare arithmetic strategies, and analyze visual patterns. My principal had stopped by a few times to see what was going on. And in a meeting after one of those visits, he shared the observation that my students hadn’t seemed to get any better at number talks over the last several weeks.

He was right. I can give lots of reasons now why my number talks didn’t make a difference. I didn’t create a culture where students listened to each others’ strategies. I chose problems haphazardly, without sequencing them toward coherent goals. I made the number talks too difficult too fast.

But those problems masked a deeper issue. I wasn’t looking for evidence of student learning. I was convinced that number talks were a great routine, that students had so much to benefit by improving their number sense. But I wasn’t willing to be wrong. I was so focused on the routines and structures I created as a teacher that I ignored the actual goal of learning.

In the online-math-education-writing space, it’s much easier to focus on the inputs than the outputs. It’s easier to argue that teachers should do this or not do that than to think about how students experience the math classroom. But I’m a better teacher when I focus on what students experience first, and my actions as a teacher second.

I’m not sure, but I think these are my values for the student experience, more or less in order:

• I want students to see that they have agency in their learning; that when they work hard they are able to learn math.
• I want students to consistently recognize their own successes.
• I want students to recognize that I care about their success.
• I want students to enjoy learning math.

I care about these experiences because I find them self-perpetuating. When students feel agency they are more likely to persevere through challenges in the future. When students feel successful they develop a positive self-concept as mathematicians and see themselves continuing their math education. When students see that I care about their success they are willing to ask for help when they need it and let me know when things aren’t working. When students enjoy learning math they show up to class ready to think hard and engage.

But it’s easy to focus on the inputs. To assume that if I teach a certain way, students will have a positive experience and everything will be great. That type of thinking encourages me not to notice what’s actually happening in my classroom. I become an ideologue, spouting truisms about the way math should be taught and blaming students if they don’t learn. I’ve done this in two directions. I’ve practiced “I do, we do, you do,” telling students, “I explained it,” confused when they didn’t understand. And I’ve tried to lead students to their own understanding, telling students, “you’ll understand it if you figure it out yourself,” and griped afterward about how my students aren’t independent enough.

In both of these cases, the students who succeed are the students who have been successful in the past. They’re the students with more privilege and more social capital, who are more likely to receive affirmations from teachers and to have a positive self-concept as a learner. If I’m not willing to ask myself hard questions about how students experience my class, I’m teaching for the students who need it the least. In both cases, I’m treating students as a variable and my pedagogical choices as a constant. Instead, I want to see my pedagogy as the variable, and to measure the success of pedagogy by the experiences of the students in the room.