Tips for Using These Videos with Your Students:
Many of our collaborating teachers have used these videos with their classes. Here is some of their advice for making it work well in your class!
- Don’t treat the videos like they have right answers. Ask the students to tell what patterns they see and what makes them think that. Depending upon what level they are analyzing the patterns at, different patterns make sense.
- Give all of your students think time before discussing each pattern. You can have them jot their ideas on paper or make up an activity sheet to put their ideas on.
- Some of us went over each type of pattern or handed out a sheet first and had the students match them. Others had the students talk about what happened and what it was like and then named the causal pattern. The second way invites more ambiguity, but also deeper processing. Either way can work well depending upon your students.
- Encourage students to compare the videos to what they see in the real world. This helps them to begin seeing the causal patterns all around them.
- Try to get students to focus on the features of what makes a certain scene a certain kind of causal pattern. This will help you detect confusions between different causal patterns.
- The causal patterns can work together, so students might notice more than one type in one video.
- My students made up names for some of the patterns that they saw and we used these in our classes. Help them think about causal patterns in the world, not to memorize a certain set. For instance, my students chose the name "spiraling causality" instead of "escalating causality" because escalating only goes up, not down. Many of the names on this website came from former students!
- If you compare two different videos, show them each multiple times and make some notes on the board to help students hold the ideas in their heads to compare them. Otherwise, it can be too much information at once!
- Get students to be as specific as possible to help you analyze confusions. For instance, if a student says, "In relational causality, you have to have two things," encourage them to say more. Are they focusing on comparing the two things as in a relationship? Or just adding the two things together?
- Watch the same video a number of times in one sitting and see how students’ ideas deepen and change.
- Later in the year, you can try having students create their own videos. It will help them to transfer the concepts and will tell you a lot about how they understand the different patterns.
