The Classroom That Showed Me What's Possible—And Forced a Choice

In the first five minutes sitting in Mr. Li’s 8th grade math class, my jaw dropped.

Did that 13-year-old student just give a 90 second response about his own thoughts on a question Mr. Li asked about a scatterplot?

And did his classmates listen and get excited to respond to what he was saying?

This was several years after I began teaching middle school math, when I had the opportunity to visit several other schools with a group of colleagues. As I sat through the rest of the math block, it was clear there was a culture of discourse and willingness to share in-progress, unfinished thinking without regard to whether it was fully correct in this classroom.

I had never seen my own students speak at length in this way. I prided myself on not just telling or lecturing, and instead asking lots of questions, requiring that students answer in complete sentences, and celebrating mistakes. Maybe they’d speak more than a few seconds if they were recounting steps they took to arrive at an answer, but I could not recall hearing a students share and respond to such in-depth thoughts to all of their classmates.

This was a disorienting dilemma for me. Math educator Mike Flynn presented about the path to and through disorienting dilemmas at the 2024 NCSM conference. He talked about how these kinds of experiences can cause a negative emotional experience and can lead to guilt, shame, or embarrassment.

So this was a fork-in-the-road moment. I had two choices for what to think next: 

Choice 1: My kids can’t do this. These kids are special.

Choice 2: I don’t yet know how to set up my classroom so that my kids can do this.

Choice 1 allows me to externalize ownership. It’s a defense mechanism that lets me avoid the negative emotional experience of considering I may not be holding as high of expectations as I need to for my students.

Choice 2 is painful. It means my identity as a competent teacher is challenged, and owning that I have major learning to do. 

Ideally, a disorienting dilemma leads to change. This one did for me. While I still had no idea how to move my classroom environment from where it was to the kind of environment I experienced in Mr. Li’s room, by making choice 2 I now had a vision for what could be true.

Next month, I’ll share some of the key resources and moments that helped me move forward in fits and starts over the my next years in the classroom.