Thursday, October 20, 2016

Empowering Students in the Classroom

This week’s article summary is Lessons Learned Going Back to School.

The focus is on a math teacher who after attending graduate school full time decided to implement more progressive, child-centered teaching strategies  in her classroom.

Enthusiastic to change from more traditional lecture style, she found the implementation to student-voice/choice and inquiry-based learning much more challenging in reality compared to the ideal of her graduate school studies.

However, she persisted (as she expects from her students), continually assessing and adjusting as needed, and ultimately found success in smaller rather than bigger ideas and initiatives. 

The article resonated for me because her experiences are what we—as teachers--all deal with: not only balancing traditional and progressive teaching methods but having periodic doubts and questions about our effectiveness in the classroom, I.e., are my students really learning.

Joe

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After being in graduate school full-time and then returning to the classroom as a teacher, I was ready to move away from the comfortable (and manageable) lecture-and-note-taking pedagogy I used before.

I was psyched to bring high-level tasks, cognitive demand, meaningful math discussions, and effective group work to my classroom.

But making these changes was not a simple matter.

As a teacher, talking less and asking students to take more responsibility for their learning involved layers of complexity that I had not anticipated.

For example, many students and parents believed that a good mathematics teacher could and would clearly explain the concepts and procedures before students tackled a problem and that struggling with the material was a bad sign.  

Here are some of the challenges I faced especially in the opening weeks of school:
  • Building on student thinking was difficult without classroom norms that supported productive student work
  • Encouraging students to use mathematical reasoning and persist with solving problems didn’t make me feel successful and competent
  • Figuring out what I should do next and managing classroom time often kept me from using real-time assessments to respond to students’ understanding.

The whole approach often felt as uncomfortable as ill-fitting shoes. Secretly, I longed to just ‘show and tell’ for a while. I began to grow weary and unsure of myself.

But I persisted and by the end of the year, my students were getting into a groove.

The three key lessons I learned were:

Think big – and small; My big-picture goal for the year – implementing student-centered instruction that helped develop students’ persistence in solving problems – was hard to measure day by day, and as a result, I often felt overwhelmed and discouraged. To maintain my sanity, I set smaller, weekly goals that were way-stations to the ultimate outcome. Some examples:
  • Showing student work on a document camera at least twice weekly
  • Preparing and asking one high-level question each day
  • Anticipating students’ strategies for one core lesson
  • Using a written record for real-time assessments
  • Using student work in the summary phase of lesson             

Limit initiatives to those that support the big goal: As we try to change and grow our practice, whether self-driven or motivated by policy or district-level change, we will encounter more ideas than we can possibly implement in a year or even our whole career. It pays to focus on a smaller set of objectives, and for a while, selectively choose initiatives that fit those goals. For example, I went to a workshop that presented 50 great classroom apps and chose two that specifically encouraged mathematical communication and offered assessment strategies that support multiple competencies.

Collaboration is key: My biggest support came from working alongside other mathematics teachers. I co-taught, observed colleagues, discussed goals (big and small), monitored students’ progress, and (with some trepidation) invited other teachers to observe my teaching and give feedback. 

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