From the LTP project site-- these folks at UW, Michigan, and UCLA will be our likely partners in the pre-service overhaul we're taking on (I'm just trying to get a head start and figure out my own thinking before being in the same room as all these intimidating scholars)-- I'm looking for:
"a small set of common instructional activities, which are chosen to have legitimacy in actual school classrooms and known to support student achievement... The IAs serve as containers that carry principles, practices, and knowledge into practice and support both student learning and teacher learning... They support student learning in classrooms by structuring students’ engagement with mathematics and with their teacher in a way that consistently maintains high cognitive demand... When teachers perform these routines, they are required to make judgments about how to respond to students using the knowledge, principles, and practices that make up the “curriculum” that supports learning to do the work teaching. The IAs are structured to limit the territory in which novices need to make these kinds of judgments so that the mathematical knowledge and the practices they need to use to do them are able to be specified."The examples they give, in elementary mathematics, are choral counting (click the link above to see a detailed description, since I'm not sure I'm allowed to copy the image), facilitating strategy sharing, leading a string of computational problems, and leading a problem-solving activity.
I'd love to read more about the latter three examples just to make sure I understand how they are routinized or turned into activities, but until I find that resource, I'm going to continue trying to brainstorm, based on the research I've read and classrooms I've observed, to come up with something shareable. Each routine/activity/structure will reflect the principles and practices linked on the LTP site, and these Core Components of instruction. Here's where my brain is now-- the "containers" I want to test:
- Launching/posing a problem - I'm still compelled that this is broad enough to give opportunities for the principles and practices and Core Components, but narrow enough to be turned into a protocol and learned by novices. I don't know whether this overlaps with the suggested "leading a problem-solving activity" above, because I don't know what is meant by that and don't want to simply infer.
- Facilitating strategy sharing - Ditto. And there's lots of room for flexibility and teacher judgment as novices get their feet under them.
- something related to introducing formal mathematics - In a more exploratory lesson, this phase might come closer to the end, where students are generalizing and formalizing what they've developed. In a more traditional lesson, this might come closer to the beginning. This feels compelling in that I think it needs to be done and is difficult to do and therefore worth teaching novices a strategy/routine/activity/protocol for doing it well (in a way that aligns with the practices and Core Components). I feel less clear on how we might do that.
I'm sure there are more. I'm curious about the "leading a string of computational problems," in particular. But I'll hold off for now. And I'm still hopeful that, when taken together in some sequence or another, these routines/activities/structures could "add up" to a cohesive lesson, as they do in my colleague's ECE work: morning meeting, writer's workshop, read-aloud, phonics group, math group, centers, closing circle.
But what does this make you think? More learnable? More concrete? Thanks for joining me on this journey :)
I think this is certainly more achievable for novice teachers, but still broad enough that they can keep working on those techniques (I am still working on them) for a long time.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in there I feel that teaching them appropriate scaffolding techniques is very important. In my first month of teaching, my kids were constantly frustrated until someone showed me via a single topic, how to lay out problems in a way of increasing complexity, so that the problems can become accessible and therefore explorable for kids, and the kids can take the half-cues and take a stab at the next problems using a reasonable approach. Without at least some scaffolding or framework of strategies, the gap between step 1 and step 2 in your list can be gigantic and daunting to the kids, causing all kinds of behavioral issues to come about (esp in a Year 1 teacher's classroom). I think it should be added as an additional step: prior to strategy sharing, there should be some sort of intended mental path with breadcrumbs along the way. As the novice teacher feels more comfortable, they can remove more and more breadcrumbs, perhaps, and expect the kids to struggle more and more productively on their own, but someone should be pointing out the importance of scaffolding as an important element of learning a brand new topic...
One of the things our software has sought to achieve is proper scaffolding.
ReplyDeleteOne of the concerns that is commonly raised is do the students respond according to a standard?
The answer is yes. As our data (http://learnbop.net) supports even though we are moving towards a standardized goal that the methods can vary radically. Even though the decision of how to scaffold changes based on the student's past performance because we look at exactly they are doing every step of the way we quickly know where the students are going wrong.
Take for instance a five step Algebra problem. If you knew immediately that steps 1-3 were ok but the majority of students were going wrong at step 4 you would know that you need to dedicate more time to resolving the issue at that juncture. So in one sense the formality is unfamiliar and seemingly impersonal in another sense it allows the teacher to target a student's area of greatest weakness so that precious class time is spent making the most impact on the student as possible.
Every teacher hopes that the student will develop an intrinsic interest in the material and succeed. Part of that is establishing confidence in the material and when a student sees that they are achieving with relationship to the students around them they become empowered