Defusing the Cult(ure) of Correctness — Educating Grace Has Got Me Thinking

Painting of woman looking into hand mirror with egg on her faceThe latest post at Educating Grace is about breaking down classroom cultures of “fishing for or steering people towards the right answer, treating wrong answers as dangerous, only valuing people who give right answers.”  My comment got so long that Blogger wouldn’t accept it — so I’m posting here instead.

Grace starts by posting a short video clip of a PD session with math teachers, focusing on a moment where a math teacher tries to come up with a non-standard algorithm but ends up getting the wrong answer.  You should go watch it now.

I actually found it hard to watch.  I felt uncomfortable with the responding teacher’s growing embarrassment, as well as with the vocal performance of her embarrassment.  In the moment, I interpreted the stage-whispers she shared with a seat-mate as a way of letting the rest of the room know that she knew, of course she knew why it was wrong.  Which goes back to Grace’s point — we are in a culture where it would be shameful not to know. Mistakes require some gesture of face-saving by the mistake-maker to prove that she knows, and probably some gesture of chiding from bystanders to prove that they also know — lest they be dragged into the shame of not-knowing by association.  If it was uncomfortable for me to watch, it makes me think of how squirmy it must make students…

1.  I wanted to spend less time unpacking the idea when it was first mentioned, not more. Maybe because she loses face more for every minute she continues to make the mistake?  But maybe also because asking someone to repeat their point is (in the generic classroom of my imagination) often a cue that the teacher wants you to say something else.

So I was imagining myself writing down her process as soon as she said it, and collecting more.  Sometimes I have had success undermining the cult of correctness by putting some distance between the speaker and the strategy.  After there are 5 or 6 strategies on the board, especially if they don’t all match, I can go back and ask students to think about the pros and cons of each one.

2. Another strategy that sometimes helps me is getting people to pool their answers in small groups, and report back as a group.  This doesn’t solve the problem — they will still tend to correct each other, argue, and be mortified if their solution is different from their group-mates’ — but it means the loss of face happens in front of fewer people, where it might be more manageable.

Sometimes I explicitly help students practise recording all the strategies from their group and reporting all of them — I encourage them to discuss the differences without trying to convince the others.  Their default strategy for listening is often “decide whether it’s right or wrong”, so just telling them to stop doing that doesn’t work as well as giving them something else to do: “try to figure out why a reasonable person might think that.”


When we are looking through strategies that don’t work, I go back to the class with “why might a reasonable person think this.”  With teachers, we might be able to deflect attention away from ourselves by asking, “This is a tempting strategy that a student could easily use.  Why might a student think this?  If they did, what could help them sort it out?”

A related approach is, “what question is this the right answer to?”  Where one commenter on the original post found something good about the strategy’s algebra, I’m finding something good about the strategy’s heuristics.  I’m not thinking about what you should actually multiply the denominator by.  I’m thinking, “that would be a good strategy if we were maintaining the same speed and trying to figure out how far we got in 1.5 hours (27 miles).” In this question we’re maintaining the same distance, and asking how fast, not how far…. but it’s still an example of using the previous problem to solve a new one.

In the debrief, I found myself wanting to talk about, how easy it is to answer a different question than we meant to, especially if we’re trying to do things in a new way.  This must happen to students all the time — they likely have some experience with speed and distance, and some comfortable ways of thinking about them.  We’re asking them to think about familiar things in unfamiliar ways, and that’s going to be disorienting.  It points to the idea that we have to be careful in our assessments — just because someone gives that kind of answer, it doesn’t mean they don’t understand speed and distance.  In fact, it might be an indicator of a new layer of connectedness in our thinking — similar to what Brian Frank refers to as “U-shaped development.”

The fact that the responding teacher was deliberately trying to come up with a non-standard algorithm shows intellectual courage and autonomy, traits I want to encourage in my students.  What helped her develop that courage?  How could we help our students develop it?  I’d be curious to hear the answers from the teachers in the PD session.

One comment

  1. I still think you ought to be on Twitter 🙂 Thank you for sharing these suggestions and strategies– they make a lot of sense to me. Aside from that, though, two things particularly struck me about your response: first, the distinction between simply feeling embarrassment and vocally performing embarrassment, and then the way in which you’d approach the debrief.

    In terms of the first, I think that’s why this episode has stuck with me for so many months (the video is from the beginning of this past school year); if I had just perceived embarrassment, I think it would have felt more sufficient to smile, acknowledge it warmly, and address the idea mathematically. It was the vocal performance– and persistence– that made me feel like I should have done something more.

    In terms of the latter, I appreciate the way your comments normalize the situation, connect to student experiences in a way that brings empathy to the foreground, challenge us as teachers to more deeply understand what students are actually thinking rather than accepting their words as the entirety of their understanding, and also reinforce habits/traits we’d want to encourage. That’s a lot of really powerful stuff you’ve packed into just a few lines!

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