Tackling the Tough Questions - Responding to Feedback from Professional Learning around Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's "Cultivating Genius"

I plan on answering some of the questions you left for us in the feedback form (in no particular order):

1. How do we ensure that we are teaching students how to think, not what to think, when we incorporate criticality in our classes?

According to Dr. Muhammad, "Teaching criticality helps students assume responsibility for the ways in which they process information - to avoid being passive consumers of knowledge and information."   One of the main goals of Criticality is to offer students multiple opportunities to experience varied voices and perspectives. We show these different perspectives, but we must allow students to make their own decisions.  For example, we can encourage students to use different lenses to view the same topic, such as the development of the HeLa cell: We ask students to weigh the value of the discovery to society while also encouraging them to consider the ethics, morality, and meaning for marginalized groups. It is important to show varying perspectives and narratives; we use this to teach students to sit with discomfort and how to respond professionally and with poise to ideas, narratives, and opinions that may not match their own.

2. Where can I find specific examples of this in math? 

Dr. Muhammad offered a training session where she shared some examples for applying her framework to mathematics: 

• History of credit scores and how they are disproportionate across communities. Consider: why might students require a credit score, and how does this connect to their identity?

• Analyzing Revenue: deriving/creating algorithms as related to the gaming/YouTube industry.

• Algebra 2: Reparations - writing and solving equations to represent how reparations could/should be calculated.

Other shifts:

• Crafting word problems to evaluate/mitigate/analyze real-world concerns.

• Highlight mathematicians from various cultures.

• Discuss different ways mathematics is taught/solved around the world. 

3. I would love to incorporate more of this stuff into my class but I am always brought back to the issue of how and when. I am already strapped for time. I can't figure out how or where to incorporate more of this. 

Start with the big-picture lens of your course (which is also a guidepoint of reflection for students):

1. What did I learn?

2. Why did I learn this?

3. How will I use what I learned?

Answering these questions on the broad-spectrum level for your course will illuminate the meaning and purpose behind the class which is your access point for connecting with students through Identity.

This is not something you “need to do everyday,” but instead finding pockets where it could naturally fit:

• Where someone failed and how it aided into the knowledge we have today (examples: a bridge collapsed, a plane crashed, ignoring someone’s knowledge because they didn’t fit the expectations of a ‘scholar,’ etc.)

• Personal connections to the material and other subjects (example in Physics, Physical Education, Mathematics, Psychology, Business):

• Determine your power by measuring the time it takes you to run up two flights of stairs. Find the height you have raised your body by measuring the height of each step and multiplying by the number of steps. Then multiply this height in meters by your weight in newtons and divide the product by the time in seconds. The result will be your power in watts. 

• How watts are used to determine metrics in the “Leaderboard” on popular digital exercise platforms. 

• How breathing is measured for VO2 max.  

• How this use of measurement is gamified to earn subscribers and the psychology behind it. 

• Which figure are you most like?  Online quizzes which help students connect to different people and perspectives (which scientist, which philosopher, which historian, etc.).

• In foreign languages, students could explore the history behind why certain words are gendered. How the language reveals value systems (linguistic relativity).