{"id":59,"date":"2022-12-11T16:53:54","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T16:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2022-12-15T19:04:12","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T19:04:12","slug":"launch","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/launch\/","title":{"rendered":"Areas of Proficiency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Launch <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Press to see video of my interaction with Mahiya and Luis <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During the launch, one strength was my ability to provide many spaces where my students could independently and actively engage with the problem as I introduced it to them. After I read each new part of the problem, I would ask a question and have my students turn to a partner to discuss it. As Chapin et al. (2003) assert, such a strategy is critical as it can open the conversation to students who may not feel comfortable speaking in the whole class setting. It can also provide space where my students may feel more comfortable raising their questions with a single peer and coming to an answer or thinking about how they could ask it to the whole class (p. 19-20). Even more, as the video shows, I also effectively oriented my students toward each other\u2019s thinking during this talk time. Noticing that two students were off-topic and needed redirecting, I guided them by referring to the problem. When Mahiya began giving her answer to me, I told her to \u201cturn to your partner and tell him.\u201d Importantly, I moved away from the traditional role of the teacher as the sole possessor of knowledge who rotely tells and guides their students through procedures. Instead, aligning more with Hiebert et al. (1997), I strove towards the goal of \u201cfacilitating conceptual understanding\u201d through the \u201cestablishment of a classroom culture in which pupils work on novel problems individually and interactively\u201d (p. 8). A small strategy, it can help me better forge a mathematical environment where my students agentively participate as co-learners who make meaning and engage with the mathematical content.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Representation of the problem and my students’ thinking <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Further, in response to previous feedback, I have strived to be more deliberate in representing my students’ thinking. As the picture\u00a0(right)<\/strong>\u00a0shows, I successfully recorded my students’ thinking on the board during the formative task. For example, in responding to the second question of my launch where I asked what new information we learned, Lyric said that Elijah has eight red cars, and the rest are blue. I recorded this down on the board, intentionally including the labels to contextualize what these responses meant in terms of the problem. In this manner, I could clarify what the problem was asking my students without taking away the cognitive load by telling them which were the important numbers. Even more, I could provide a clear view of the critical information for my students who may become overwhelmed by too much writing (Karp & Howell, 2004, p. 123). Particularly for my ELL students, writing down the numbers with short labels could provide more manageable language for them to understand. In this manner, aligning with the goal of creating a worthwhile formative task that students can engage with independently and shoulder the cognitive load, I was able to center my student \u2013 Lyric \u2013 as central to contextualizing the problem while also making it more accessible for my ELL students. Even more, I supported this effort by providing and referring to visual representations of toy cars in my presentation. By providing multiple modalities when introducing the problem, I could also lessen the linguistic load for my ELL students by not having them process all of the academic English language while keeping the task the same for them (Yeh et al., 2020, p. 711).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facilitating Productive Struggle <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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My expectations for independent practice (click to enlarge)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Click to see my re-establishing of the expectations<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Turning to how I facilitated productive struggle for the formative task, I was particularly successful with setting up clear norms and expectations for my students before they worked independently. As the picture of my norms shows, I particularly tried to create norms that moved my students away from depending on me to immediately provide them the answer or the concrete strategy they could use to solve the problem. Indeed, one of my norms was that if my students were stuck, they should try a different way of figuring out the problem. If they still could not solve it, they should turn to the people at their table to help them. If they still needed help understanding the problem, they should raise their hand to ask for my help. Such a strategy provides one possible solution to the dilemma of balancing between overemphasizing students’ sense making with no structure and the teacher becoming the sole arbiter of correctness (Hiebert et al., 1997, p. 30). That is, I provide scaffolds for my students that make clear and explicit my expectations for classroom discussion. In this manner, I create a more structured environment for my students to discuss the problem with their peers. Yet, at the same time, I decenter myself as the sole arbiter of correctness and lean more into my students learning together and depending on their own ideas and knowledges to make meaning of the problem. Even more importantly, as seen in the video, I also consistently returned to these norms and expectations throughout independent practice. I continuously reminded my students that they could talk with their peers if they were struggling. Thus, with these expectations, I could not only create a norm that leverages and uplifts my students as having valid knowledge but also continuously reinforces this norm to solidify it into the classroom culture (Yeh et al., 2020, p. 713).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Launch During the launch, one strength was my ability to provide many spaces where my students could independently and actively engage with the problem as I introduced it to them. After I read each new part of the problem, I would ask a question and have my students turn to a partner to discuss … <\/p>\n

Read more “Areas of Proficiency”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"inspiro_hide_title":false,"inspiro_hide_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-59","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349,"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oliviaschafferutap.upenn.domains\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}