I think you hit upon one of the challenging aspects of having students use each other as resources - are they ready for and engaged enough that they continue the discussion without your supervision? Some teachers tried using points systems, adding and subtracting points from a group’s final grade for on-task v. off-task behavior. Asking students to rate each other on the effectiveness of their group participation could also be helpful. I wonder if others have other ideas about this though.
The kind of classroom culture that I would like to create is that of collaboration, experimentation and persistence.
Engaging students in programming and modeling science concepts through computers shifts my role from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side.” As a guide, my students have every chance to seek each other for help when working on projects. This kind of 'working environment" will lead them to resort to collaboration as a way to succeed in projects wherein there is no one person who holds all the answers and solutions to every question and problem posed.
As guide, I will be encouraging my students to explore, experiment and never be afraid to make mistakes. This kind of encouragement will inculcate in my students the idea that “mistakes are friends” and that the more mistakes we make, the better we are at finding the solutions to problems.
I will be encouraging my students to be persistent because programming takes time (like most substantial learning) and that if we all give up and get discouraged with the first hint of failure, we will never be able to make essential progress on the path to learning. Persistence, therefore becomes a necessary ingredient when creating a learning environment that uses mistakes as learning opportunities.
To sum up, when I have embraced the role of guide and facilitator, the kind of culture that I help create in my classroom would be that which promotes persistence and encourages experimentation and collaboration.
A few of the problems that I would encounter along the way would be: time constraints; resistance to a new way of learning; technology or the lack of it.
First of all, because learning through experimentation and making mistakes takes time, I may see that time management will become a real challenge, especially when I as a teacher also have to comply with test prep requirements.
In addition to time, I could see that many students (and maybe parents and administration) may have problems embracing this revolutionary idea of letting the students take the lead in their learning, and have the teacher’s role shift from lecturer and sole source of knowledge, to guide and facilitator.
Finally, because programming requires computers that have the required capabilities, as a well as a faster internet connection, there may be big problems encountered in schools where every student’s access to the technologies needed may be limited.
My goal for this year is to definitely be more of a “guide on the side” and to have students work on persistence when they are “stuck” and solve their problems on their own. I love the 6 Rules to getting unstuck and would like to use that mentality throughout the school year with my students. I think it will be challenging as students are so used to getting the answer from a teacher when they are stuck that it will take a lot of effort to encourage this mind-shift.
I think the fact that I didn’t know much about coding made me hesitant at first to become apart of this PD but I decided to take a risk and go for it. I love the mentality that everyone in the room is a learner as you mentioned and I think this year I definitely want to be more transparent with my students that no one is an expert and we all can learn from each other.
Students are terrified of making mistakes. I spend a lot of time telling them that mistakes are good because we can learn from them but it literally takes at least half of the school year before they understand that and are comfortable with the idea. Students love love looooove to ask questions and are always super curious but I struggle to help them lead their curiosity into a long term investigation that they will stick with and stay invested in.
I would like to provide students with many different strategies for getting unstuck, as suggested in the video. In my experience teaching with Scratch, I could figure out many things with/for students, but as their code grew more complex, even if I was able to find a problem, it would take way too long to understand their code in the time we had available in the classroom. So students needed other ways to solve problems and get help. I encouraged really stuck kids to post on the Scratch forums and get help from the programming community, or to look at the Scratch Wiki (kind of like the documentation for other languages). I also used paired programming as a way to encourage students to learn together and to have more than one set of eyes on their code. I anticipate using similar ideas in a computational modeling classroom.