Day 3--The Big Idea about Big Ideas

I have to admit that the reading for today and the classroom activities were a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around, not because they were terribly complex, but because they required my brain to think in a way that I don't normally think.

What was most apparent after doing the group activity where we came up Big Ideas for the different strands is how difficult it is for many of us to wrap our brains around the concept of big ideas.  There was a lot of struggle in our group around what should be included in a big idea statement, whether things were too specific or too broad, and how to write a statement that accurately expressed what it was we were thinking.  It caused me to reflect on my own education and learning and re-evaluate what I thought about them.

I am a details kind of person; I don't really care about the big picture.  Part of why I found math so appealing was the consistency and the black and white nature of math: 2+2 always equaled four, questions had answers, and those answers were either wrong or right.  Math was logical and made sense.  Then limits with x approaching zero but never getting there started to happen, and that was the end of  math for me.  I was okay with that because I still felt pretty good about my math abilities.  So the idea of not teaching rules and procedures goes against everything that worked for me and works for people like me. This has been a source of great stress for me because I feel that the current trend in education is to move away from people who learn the way that I do, and I feel that is a disservice to those students--sort of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The problem, I realize now, is that just finding something that works is not enough.  We have to push our students pass just finding what works for them.  We need to push them to wonder and ask questions,

We want our students to be great thinkers who can transfer their knowledge and understanding to a variety of different situations.  We want our students to have the skills to look at the big picture and see the interconnectedness between the things they are learning, other areas of the curriculum and the world at large.  The article shows that being able to make these connections in math has positive effects not just in math, but it also promotes memory, enhances transfer, and helps to develop autonomous learners.

My only concern with the implementation of Big Ideas in the school setting, is how realistic it actually is.  As teachers, we all want to do what is in the best interest of our students.  The problem is that there are so many things that can be seen as being in there best interests: coming up with big ideas, differentiated instruction, inquiry-based learning, smaller class sizer, more human resource, different curriculum etc. Some of these, no matter how great the idea, are not within our sphere of control.  One concern is that Big Ideas requires buy in from people who may not see the inherent value in it.  Another concern is that it is quite time-consuming.  It took us over an hour to come up with 5 Big ideas for one strand for 4 grades. Multiply that by 5 and you can see that, though worthwhile, it is a difficult undertaking to say the least.