Creating “Let’s Try It” Classrooms

October 23, 2024

As opposed to “Just Try It” classrooms.

Dan Meyer is fun to read. He’s especially fun to read lately, when he’s turned a skeptical eye on AI and pilloried the techno-optimism of the newest batch of would-be tech-educational reformers/salespeople. Normally I read his emails, chuckle and nod, and then move along.

Not this morning. This morning I read Dan Meyer’s piece about “Creating Just Try It Classrooms“ and I felt that spidey-sense tingling. Was I going to be hearing these words for the next decade? And were they the right words?

Some Context

The trouble is, Dan Meyer has a kind of marketing superpower in the math ed space. He’s masterful at creating or popularizing catchy analogies, taglines, and structures: full-stack problem-solvers, ladder of abstraction, students’ brilliance. They didn’t all stick, but some did. Some really did. I’ve heard “if math is the aspirin, how do we create the headache?” for years now; I find it cloying, but not particularly harmful. He also coined “Open Middle,” which I find quite useful as a way to describe a certain type of problem that’s distinct from “open-ended.” (Robert Kaplinsky and others ended up running with the term, with openmiddle.com and more.)

He also developed 3-act tasks. I haven’t heard him talk about these in years, and I’m not sure how he feels about them now. But for a while, everyone was doing them, and they’re still showing up in textbooks and curriculum. 3-act tasks are a flashy and memorable name for problems with a clear beginning, middle, and end (patterned off a 3-act narrative structure), with some kind of media to help launch them. They were huge, and the impact of them is still felt.

The problem is, the quality of 3-act tasks can vary wildly, and it can be hard to tell if you’re looking at one that’s going to work in your classroom or not. A lot of Dan Meyer’s original tasks were quite good, but because the emphasis in his communication was on the form of the tasks, rather than the quality of the mathematics at their heart, people made and distributed tasks without having a way to check if they were likely to work in a classroom. Maybe they felt like they did work in the classroom, in the sense that the kids paid more attention to the media than they usually did to book diagrams. But a lot of 3-act tasks don’t lead to rich learning, and if you’re going to spend a class period on one problem, it should be good enough to deserve it.

Just Try It

But whatever – if Dan Meyer throws out catchy taglines, and if he’s particularly good at framing his ideas in sticky ways, then we should learn from him. Except, seeing his essay today, I had a premonition that people would be talking about “Just Try It” Classrooms at conferences and online for years to come; someone would build the “Just Try It” PD series, curriculum companies would start including “Just Try It” problems. And that teachers in classrooms everywhere would start telling their students to “Just Try It,” and be missing precisely the uncommon energy Dan Meyer was trying to capture in his essay.

The problem is that education is notoriously faddish, and that means we need to push against the calcification of a good idea into a mandatory routine almost as soon as the good idea in articulated. Also, we need to make sure we state the good idea in the most accurate way we can.

And context matters. “Just Do It” is, of course, the Nike slogan, and the heartbeat of one of the most brilliant ad campaigns in history.

They’re selling shoes, but they’re marketing sports, struggle, challenge, triumph, possibilities.

But Just Do It doesn’t work in the math classroom, because it evokes coercion. Just Do It… because I told you to do it. It’s the opposite of the Nike ad: you’re less than you think you are.

Is Just Try It better?

Better, but Not Quite There

Yes, it’s better. But I don’t think it’s good enough. And it’s too catchy to be not good enough.

The problem is that Just Try It still has a coercive quality (albeit slightly whinier and less hostile: “Can you please Just Try It?”) It’s not a satisfying answer to the excellent, fundamental question Dan Meyer articulates in his piece:

“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?”

Let’s Try It vs. Just Try It

What’s missing is the sense of support from teachers. It’s not just “Try It” that we need to communicate, it’s “Try it, and I’ll back you up.”

What we need to communicate is “We’re in this together.”

What we need to say is “Let’s Try It.”

Because we’re selling math, but we’re marketing everything math can do for you: thought, power, pleasure, struggle, challenge, triumph, possibility, But when it comes to math, people need to know that their teacher is with them, that their class is a community that backs them, and that the challenge is worth it. It’s unbelievably easy to coerce students into doing it your way, even when your way is just about trying something out. We need to invite people into mathematics, and let them know they have our support.

Let’s Try It.

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Stephanie (Math Rebel Stuff)
Stephanie (Math Rebel Stuff)
18 days ago

I love that one simple change! And, you are one of my two fave math Dans, with Dan Meyer being the other.

Thanks for this caveat because I have seen Dweck and Boaler’s research, words, and work around shifting mindsets horribly oversimplified and misapplied. I hope you have shared it with Dan Meyer, too.

Let’s try it! is an open invitation that messages: Together, we can.

Lonna
Lonna
18 days ago

I agree. We, the teachers and their peers are the community. We give snaps to each other whether we are right or wrong in our discussions, if we back up our thinking. It “gives us some thing to talk about.”
Last week, a student told me, “I like to hear how they solved the problem, especially when they get it wrong. Then we slow down and looks at all steps.”

@geonz
18 days ago

When I’ve actually built trust with a student, I can get to where I can say “I’m asking you to just do this.” I’d learned that to keep from procrastinating on starting a thing, I had to just (ONLY) do THIS as opposed ot “oh, let me get a drink first,” or “let me answer this blog post first” (oops, it was pre-internet but yes, I need to apply it now…)
(I’m support, not in the classroom, but I can see it being “it depends” there, too.)

Angelo DeMattia
Angelo DeMattia
14 days ago

“Just do it” is so much of a stronger invite than “just try it.” “Try” is simply asking for failure. As the students.