Transcript

I want -- if you'll be willing, we're going to do a little experiment.  I want to both keep us on the dance floor.  That's an analysis of the situation.  Then I'd like to go up every once in awhile to the balcony, and look at what we're doing to start this class up. . . .

This is a group process.  Everybody has responsibility.  We talk a lot about partnership and community.  And when you get in the balcony, you're talking to the community.  And in doing that, in inviting the class to depart from the topic, and go to the process by which we're working together, you help reinforce the idea that they are a community of learners, and that we all have a joint problem.  It isn't just the professor's problem, or the participants' problem.  And that, two, it's a partnership. . . .

If you watch your students with discipline, with care so that you know what their eyes are signaling you, and their carriage is signaling you.  There is a gestalt, and you say to yourself, as a matter of faith, something has happened.

M: Well, it seems like the whole class, 90 percent or more of the group, is accelerating.  So my question: is it better to let the student sit back for the whole class, or is it better to slow the whole class down for the student?

Carmen, would you stick -- that's a neat problem.  May I try to put it up a level of abstraction? It's how are you managing the minorities, whether they be unprepared ... in relation to the majority? You always have this multiple pacing problem.