ABSTRACT
My interest in student collaboration dates back to my University of Maryland summer course with Ron McKeen. One day he invited his friend Neil Davidson to teach the class. Similar to Ron’s approach, Neil offered provocative questions: “Why do we always tell students what they need to know and never let them discover it for themselves?” He invited us to visit his summer school math class for elementary teachers. I was delighted. When I arrived, the class was divided into groups of four. They’d been studying parallel lines and were now researching parallelograms. Each group sought to discover why the opposite sides of these quadrilaterals had to be of equal length. To prove this, they introduced one of the parallelogram’s diagonals and went on to prove that the two triangles thus formed were congruent. This proof is normally the province of the teacher or textbook, but these students were excitedly discovering the proof for themselves. A whole new chemistry of learning was rolling out before me. I felt privileged to watch and excited to be a teacher!
