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Lauren Kutch
Dr. Edwards
MAED 4416
3/16/21
Clinical Interview
In preparation for the Clinical Interview, I selected what I considered to be a high-
level thinking task. I tried to find a task that would prove challenging but not impossible,
and require my selected student to have to sit and think for a moment. In this deciding
process, I became very aware of the difference between a problem and an exercise. A
problem is a challenge that the student has potentially never seen before, but is equipped
with the knowledge to solve it. An exercise is merely a practice of a problem they have
already learned to solve.
I began to form ideas of how I would guide my student through this problem if she
needed my support. I collected and jotted down questions such as, “What do you first
notice about this problem?” “What do you already know?” “How does this connect or
look similar to something you’ve already learned?” I wanted to ask thought-provoking
questions and merely give hints, not solutions. This actually proved to be rather difficult
for me during the interview. It was very hard for me to let her struggle and use the very
necessary “wait time” for thinking to happen.
To begin, I had her put her pencil down and just look at the problem. I let it settle
with her for a moment while she began to collect her thoughts and then I began my
guiding questions. I began with, “What stands out to you about this problem?” “Does any
of it look familiar?” “What tools do you think you can use to solve it?” To my dismay, I
failed to realize that the problem that I had selected required a good bit of abstract
algebraic thinking. However, my student is in ninth grade so her abstract thinking skills
in reference to mathematics were not fully tapped into quite yet. When she admitted to
me that she’d never seen something like this before, I had to resist the urge to throw on
my teacher voice and begin to lecture. I tried probing her further with questions like,
“Well, you’ve worked with variables before, so what do you know about variables and
their equations that might be helpful in this problem?” We discussed for a minute the
characteristics of these variables and how they interact and behave with each other. She
was able to recall all the different types of variable manipulation she had done before
such as systems of equations, substitution, and working with solution sets. However, the
problem still proved to stump her. So, I offered a small hint to get her started: “What if
we rearrange and substitute the variables in our equations?” This lit the spark that began
our mathematical process.
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As she began to work, I made sure to have her write things down in chunks. After
each new piece of information discovered, I asked her to explain her process to me as if I
had just looked at this problem for the first time. Knowing that I was providing more
support than I expected to, I wanted to clarify that she was following with me as I guided
her through it. Once she substituted the first line of equations into the second, she was
able to use repeated reasoning to continue the problem, since it is the same process
throughout.
I wanted to create a visual to help support her thinking but she didn’t seem to need
one once she began the process. I also struggled to find a way to draw a visualization of
the problem without making it more complicated. I considered turning it into a real-world
application problem, but I felt that it was unnecessary and almost counterproductive to
the point.
Instead, I tried to focus on what Davis talked about in his article referring to the
transmission process (Davis, 3). If teaching was solely about giving information, then
why would we as educators even ask questions? By being a facilitator of learning rather
than an instructor, we see the needs of the students emerge more prominently. For
example, had I taught the task I presented to my student without asking questions or
checking for understanding, I would have been teaching, but was any learning
happening? Similarly, in Davis’ article, he talks about how Wendy used the students’
assumptions and understandings to steer her guiding instruction. But even then, she only
guided them when they needed it. Mostly, she let them teach themselves through making
connections to previous knowledge of their own. I tried to channel this teaching style and
mentality as I worked through this problem with my student. I let her questions take the
reigns and my questions steer her answers in the right direction.
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