A Meaningful Moment from the Work-in-Progress Meeting

In my group, one Mills Scholar has been routinely giving her students opportunities to show numbers in multiple ways. During our discussion of her inquiry, we made some discoveries about data. After looking at several work samples of student drawings and number sentences, the group encouraged her to look more deeply at how her focal students were thinking about numbers and how they came to produce this work. I thought about my own data, which since September has been the same collection of sources that I list on every Think Sheet and MTS form. For this presentation, which asked once again for us to state what data we collected, I re-framed my cut-and-paste list of data sources, organizing it more explicitly into process data and product data as well as "how they do it" and "how they think about how they do it" data. I offered this way of thinking to my group-mate, framing the group's suggestion as a shift from product data to process data.

For the Mills Scholar in my group, the discussion opened up new possibilities for collecting a different type of data to deepen her understanding of her students' thinking. For me, I realized that being able to explicitly name what we are doing (collecting product data vs. process data) is useful in helping us organize and think about how we are engaging in our inquiry work. And I was reminded once again that new ways of thinking can come from having to re-answer a question, restate a data source, or re-frame an idea. Just as my group-mate's students routinely represent numbers in multiple ways, and just as my own students represent their stories in multiple ways through talking, drawing and acting, there is value in asking the same thing multiple times in multiple ways... peeling the layers of the onion to deepen our thinking.