I’m settling in and back on the blog! Tonight, just some quick thoughts that grew out of some of my summer professional development. I intend to expand these ideas a bit in a future post.
When you make a graph of something, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to show others something you think is important? Or are you trying to figure out what might be important? If you teach, why do you have students create graphs?
My gut (backed up by experience in many, many different classrooms) says that when graphing is used in teaching, it usually is about showing. Do those who are out to discover something have different purposes for their graphs? Does that have implications for inquiry-oriented teaching?
Can we have our students use graphs to explore their data? What does that mean? What does it look like?
I suppose I should note that it is quite important to use graphs to show things to others and that’s key to the work of many researchers, but it’s not the only thing they do with a graph.
Do you have good examples of how you’ve used graphing in either your teaching or your research? Do you have some examples that maybe aren’t so good that you’d like to think through?
These thoughts were catalyzed by The Expeditionary Learning Schools’ High School Institute in Boston last month. The science and math slice of the institute was facilitated by Ron Berger and John LeCavalier. It was truly good stuff. Again, more on that later.
It’s good to be back in blogland!
Don
