Any Mad Men fans out there?  I just love some of the characters and the struggles they put themselves through.  In one episode from season 5, called “Signal 30,” Lane Pryce needs to take some clients out to dinner and Roger Sterling is giving him some advice on how to woo them to sign a contract with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  Since he is not an account man, Lane is nervous about landing the account.

Roger:  And then it’s kind of like being on a date.

Lane:  Flattery, I suppose…

Roger:  Within reason, but I find it best to smile and sit there like you’ve got no place to go and just let ‘em talk.  Somewhere in the middle of the entrée, they’ll throw out something revealing and you want to wait ‘til dessert to pounce on it. You know, let him know you’ve got the same problem he has.  Whatever it is, and then you’re in a conspiracy – the basis of a quote “friendship”.  Then you whip out the form.

Lane:  What if I don’t have the same problem?

Roger:  It’ll probably be something like he drinks too much, he gambles…I once went on a five minute tear about how my mother loved my father more than me and I can assure you, that’s impossible.

Lane:  Very good then, and if for some reason he’s more reserved?

Roger:  You just reverse it – feed him your own personal morsel.

Lane:  Oh I see.

Roger: (getting up to leave) That’s it, get your answers, be nice to the waiter and don’t let him near the check.

My husband and I watched this episode about the same time I was having a great deal of resistance in my class to PBL.  I was talking to my husband about how to get students to buy into the notion of learning for the sake of learning where everywhere else in their lives what measures their learning are their grades.  Why would I expect anything different from them if this is the culture they were brought up in?  They depend on their grades to get them into a good college and if their grades are not up to a certain standard, they will not “measure up.”

I get this question all the time from other teachers – about  how to motivate students to find the love of learning and the interest in problems when they do not necessary know the solution methods to find them.  I usually tell them the same things – talking about the values of the class, grading class contribution with a viewable rubric,  grading their metacognitive journal writing, rewarding them with an interesting relationship with a great teacher…OK that might be pushing it.

However, this year is different.  I am having the hardest time trying to let them know what I want from them.  They do the homework, try their best, write down notes, but for some reason it feels different.  It’s almost as if there’s this wall between them and me and I don’t know how to get them to see my side.  I have had this problem with students in the past, but usually with a whole class.  Some of them blatantly are interrupting each other and others are obviously ignoring each other.

Then my husband says, “Maybe it’s like the conspiracy.”  I said, “What?” He said,” You know, what Roger was talking about on Mad Men.  Now, Roger Sterling is no saint (those of you who watch the show know this all too well) and I usually take what he says with a grain of salt.  I also would not ever consider taking advice from him, especially about teaching, but I allowed my husband to continue.  He said maybe what I had to do was build up the conspiracy that Roger was talking about.  I had a real problem with that because I am so committed to relational pedagogy that there’s no way I could lie to or mislead a student about their learning.  But that’s not what he really meant.

I suddenly realized that what had happened was I was teaching a curriculum that I didn’t even buy into.  I had just finished teaching them matrices and matrix operations with some problems that I had written, and it went very well.  However, in the end I did have to do Cramer’s Rule and determinants.  I tried motivating the problems about determinants with the area of a parallelogram, which kept them interested for a while, but in the end, with a 3×3 it was just here’s the way to do it.  I’m not sure that I could’ve expected them to have enough prior knowledge to derive the formula for finding a determinant of a 3×3.  As much as I tried to cover it up with problem-based learning, it was still a curriculum that is antiquated and not necessarily what I felt they should be doing and learning.  I couldn’t hide it any longer.

But we’re caught aren’t we?  Do we change the whole system – college prep curriculum, SAT required math, college expectations – and if so how do we do that? (see ahbel.com for a great article on this and a keynote address called Reflections on a 119 year old curricullum!)  Do we move beyond the required standardized testing material and allow our students to see mathematics the way we see it?  Yes, that’s the conspiracy – that’s what my husband was talking about.  When kids complain to me, I will “smile and sit there while they talk” knowing that I’m going to try to get something that we have in common.  “Do you hate solving a system of three equations with three unknowns with a determinant? Oh yeah, I did too in high school.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something else?  What else should we do?  Let me find some other problems that might be interesting.”  We have the same problem (literally and figuratively), now we’re on the same playing field having similar motivating factors.

And you know what?  I don’t think it would be the end of the world if they’re not revealing and you reversed it.  We are allowed to say to them that we don’t understand why we are still teaching this and these would be my reasons for taking it out of the curriculum – part of your own personal morsel.  It might actually bring you closer as a class and have you talking about how your hands are tied and we have to get through this “together.”

Yeah, there are little tricks that can be learned and carrots that can be used to get students to do what you want them to do, but in PBL, that’s not the point.  There is very little for them to mimic because it is based on their prior knowledge.  They are the ones who need to move the curriculum forward.  So in a nutshell,

1. Take action – Get to problems in order for students to start feeling empowered and active in class.  Once they see that they are capable of a great deal on their own, it is amazing what they can accomplish.
2. Create relationships – be sure that you are being reciprocal in your attempts at problems and valuing theirs.  The concept of Relational Trust and Authority are huge parts of a PBL pedagogy (Boaler, Bingham)
3. But make sure that you are at least somewhat in control in the end because we are, at least for now, still responsible for making sure that some understanding of what we might consider unnecessary skills, for their next courses or future use.

As Roger said, “Get your answers, be nice to the waiter and don’t let ‘em near the check.”  Create that conspiracy.