I sat in Mr. Latimer’s Algebra II class today during my walk-arounds. I watched two students struggle as they attempted to figure out where they went along in a multivariable multistep equation. It was interesting because I watched them struggle with the step-by-step process, they couldn’t see clearly how change in one line affected everything that came after. Mr. Latimer and the rest of the students in the class worked with the students to work through the process, and then Mr. Latimer talked about ways to get through being "stuck" in the middle of a complex problem.

What struck me as I was watching was that they were trying to debug the equation. And on some level that’s not a radical thought. We know that math and computer science have profound links. But what struck me next was that the science teachers talk about this kind of process all the time too when they talk about experimental design and changing only one variable at a time. And I realized that we had at least three places in school where we talked around what, in my brain I was calling debugging, but kids weren’t seeing the cross-connections. They weren’t realizing they were doing the same thing.

So I went looking for Mark Miles, our computer-science / math teacher and he agreed that that was a skill that crossed discipline-based boundaries, but he called what I was talking about "incremental problem solving." And Gamal Sherif talked about how they teach the kids about dependent variables for much the same reason.

And the thing is, I don’t care what we call it… I just want kids to realize that we’re talking about the same thing.

And that’s where common language comes in. It is good to help kids understand that we may call the same basic skill different things in different contexts, but it is also good to help them develop that common language so that they don’t up spending a lot of time relearning something they already know in a different context… or as Diana Laufenberg put it when I was talked to her about it, "We have to allow for skill transference."

And that’s at the heart of common language. Lower the bar of figuring out the adults, and you raise the bar of what kids can actually do by helping them get to the work more quickly and powerfully.

So Mr. Latimer (who is also chair of our Academic Standards Committee) and I sat down at the end of the day, and next Tuesday, when our Math and Science teachers sit down to talk about ways we can better craft common language between the two disciplines, the notion of debugging or incremental problem solving or whatever will be on the table as one of the ways we can tighten our language so students can transfer skills across disciplines more easily.

And why I chose to write about this tonight was because this wouldn’t have happened if I was sitting in Mr. Latimer’s class with a checklist of things I was looking for instead of just watching and using the more open protocol of "I noticed…," "I wonder…," and "What if…." It put me in a place where I could watch and think about what I was seeing and dream a bit too. And it wouldn’t have gone anywhere if SLA teachers were defensive about their teaching or if they didn’t make the time to talk to a colleague or a principal who was excited and working through a half-baked idea or if we didn’t have structured time to talk about improving our practice or if we didn’t have a commitment as a school to creating common language wherever we can.

One of the school-wide goals we made this year was to spend more time in each other’s classrooms watching and thinking. There will be days we go in after having talked about our UbDs so we can look specifically for how we move from plan to execution. There will be days we walk through looking for opportunities for using the grade-wide themes. And there will be other lenses from time to time, too. But importantly, there will be plenty of time where we go in and just notice, wonder and dream, without a specific lens or notion of why we are there. Because the art of active observation and the will to question and dream are as important and powerful — if not more so — than any other lens might be.