Creating "Just Try It" Classrooms

As opposed to "Just Do It" classrooms.

Here is a twenty-second video compilation of several different teachers each conducting an uncommon energy inside their math classrooms.

Try it. What’s gonna happen when I say try it? Try it out. I’m gonna press try it. Okay, yeah, try it. Let’s see. Try it. Okay? So try it out. Let’s just try it. Try it. Try it one more time. You should try it? Try it. Did it work when you pressed try it? Try it. Let’s try it. Let’s try it!

What does it take to create a “Just Try It” math class?

In many math classes, students experience a “Just Do It” energy. “I showed you what to do. Just do it. You didn’t do it right. Do it again, but right this time.”

What does it take to create a classroom where students feel, rightly, that they can interact with mathematics safely, that they can experiment with mathematics? This is an open question for the curriculum and instruction nerds among my subscribers, but I’ll add several early thoughts under the categories of beliefs, pedagogy, and curriculum.

Beliefs

Do teachers believe that every question in math class has one correct route to one correct answer? If so, then they should probably expect students to just do it. By contrast, if they believe there are as many ways to be smart as there are humans in the world, then they have one of the necessary beliefs for a “Just Try It” classroom.

What other beliefs are essential to a “Just Try It” classroom?

Pedagogy

In a “Just Try It” classroom, the teacher draws ideas out of students that are not always maximally efficient or even initially correct. The teacher will follow the implications of those ideas, regardless, understanding that they’ll generate learning for the class. When a student suggests solving 5x < 15 by dividing by 3, the teacher says, “Let’s try it,” producing 5x/3 < 5 and some valuable learning, rather than using their hard and soft power to get the student back onto the most efficient path. 

What other pedagogies are essential to a “Just Try It” classroom?

Curriculum

A teacher who values diverse mathematical thinking might fight against a curriculum that does not. With digital curricula, especially, you’ll hear of students who are nervous to try out an idea for fear of losing their streak of correctness and having to start over. 

At lots of moments in our curriculum, we show students a giant “Try It” button and send them information, rather than evaluation, on their thinking, whatever that thinking was, whatever they tried.

What other features of a curriculum are essential to a “Just Try It” classroom?

Featured Comment

Mike McGibbon:

I love your first/last mile analogy, but as a tutor, I don't think this Tutor CoPilot solves those problems for me. I couldn't quite tell from your example, but it seems like this is a chat that is only visible to the tutor, and the tutor is supposed to keep one eye on the chatbot's hints while also interacting with the student. I am not eager to bring this distraction into my tutoring sessions. And while these hints might help novice tutors in the short run, I wonder if they would hamper the tutors' long term development, training them to seek answers from a bot rather than build their own teaching skills.

Odds & Ends

¶ I’m writing this an hour after a visit to a local charter school, the sort of school where kids build tiny homes and apply to community internships in their junior year. I was tagging along with a delegation of education officials from a country I won’t name out of respect for their hospitality. They were there to assess AI’s impact on education and every group they interviewed—students, teachers, and administrators—said roughly the same thing: “It’s neat, but ….”

• Students: “It’s neat, but the employers at our internship are more interested in how we work together.”

• Teachers: “It’s neat, but I’m trying to get my students to see each other as resources.”

• Administrator: “It’s neat, but we draw a socioeconomically and racially diverse student body and we’re focusing more on developing empathy and discussion across our differences.”

This was an administrator who attended ASU+GSV, the annual edtech confab in San Diego, CA. These were teachers who studied teaching at elite Bay Area institutions. These were students whose grown-ups entered them into a lottery for enrollment into this school. This is a forward-thinking school that’s an hour’s drive from Google’s headquarters. 

None of them could muster more than a limp “🥴 it’s neat I guess” when asked about artificial intelligence, all of which I offer to you as data in case it helps you re-weight your mental model of teaching, learning, and technology.