This course justifies and unpacks a teaching practice we call leveraging student thinking. This practice (actually a constellation of practices) supports important educational goals including, but not limited to, achievement as outlined in the Common Core State Standards. The elements of leveraging are:
- eliciting student thinking
- attending to significant features of that thinking
- interpreting students' ideas within a developmental framework
- bridging from students' current understandings to more sophisticated understandings
Over the course of four lessons we will explore each element listed above. We will be drawing upon both our own* and others' research,as well as the insights of practicing teachers.
* We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for their support of the research on which this course is based and the preparation of the materials found here: "Linking Teacher Preparation to Student Learning in Mathematics and Science", National Science Foundation, Award ID 0554486.
Lesson 1: Eliciting Student Thinking at the Core (available on August 19)
Goal: Design a better task -- i.e., one that will more effectively get students’ thinking on the table.
Essential Questions:
• What does it mean to leverage student thinking?
• Why is leveraging student thinking educative?
• How can you design tasks to more effectively elicit student thinking and make students' understandings more visible?
Assignments:
- Design a task to effectively elicit student thinking.
- Complete survey.
Lesson 2: Anticipating and Interpreting Student Thinking (available on August 26)
Goal: Locate your students' thinking (elicited in assignment #2) within a developmental framework.
Essential Questions: - What’s the developmental trajectory that links students' current understandings of particular concepts to more sophisticated understandings?
- What does it mean to locate student thinking within a trajectory of development?
Assignments: - Sort the student work you collected from least to most sophisticated. On what basis are you making this judgement?
- Conduct a clinical interview with one or more of your students about a concept in your subject area and hypothesize how those students' understanding might build over time "in the direction of what the expert already knows."*
*See Dewey, J. (1916).
Democracy and Education. New York: Basic Books, p. 191. See Barb's lecture in Lesson 2 to put this phrase in context)
Lesson 3: Taking Up Learners’ Ideas as Pedagogical Resources (available on September 2)
Goal: Use talk and representational tools to “take up” student thinking in ways that advance the understandings of all students.
Essential Questions: - How do teachers use student thinking to build important ideas and understandings?
Assignments:
- Analyze a video excerpt for the moves made by the teacher and students to build students' understandings.
- Videotape/audiotape a lesson in your classroom, and, with a peer, analyze the moves you and your students make to build understanding.
Lesson 4: Putting Will and Skill Together to Leverage Student Thinking (available on September 9)
Goal: Identify personal & professional challenges of leveraging practice (based on attempting, and reflecting critically on that attempt to leverage), and sketch a plan for your development of this practice.
Essential Questions:- How and why is the diversity of student ideas and understandings a resource for leveraging? In other words, how can diversity of ideas propel learning?
- What are the challenges or “pressure points” that impede the practice of leveraging in general?
- What can you do to develop this practice in your teaching context?
Assignments: - Teach, videotape/audiotape, and reflect on a lesson in which you focus on building from and through students’ ideas.
- Develop an action plan with your partner to develop your skills in leveraging student thinking
- Submit action plan as a peer assessment and assess the work of three of your peers.