Learning from Teaching Cases Summary

Monday - Friday, July 2 - 6, 2007

Date: Monday July 2, 2007

SSTP Participants: Nicole, Connie, Kelley, Bree, Mitch, Amy, Angie, Rey, Sarah, Joe, Sandy
Other Participants: Comfort (DPD), Cheryl (DPD), Barbara (DPD)

Daily Summary:

  • Task sort activity
  • intro idea of cognitive demand (procedural vs analytical vs application)
  • how teachers implement a task affect on cognitive demand
  • introductions
  • readings
  • lens for watching video--norms and "what evidence do you see on what students know?"
  • video on graphical interpretation class discussion
Still chewing on/other stuff:
  • How task in video was set up
  • Discussion on video will be tomorrow
  • First day = Good. :)

Summary By: Nicole, Connie, Kelley

Date: Tuesday July 3, 2007

SSTP Participants: Nicole, Connie, Kelley, Bree, Mitch, Amy, Angie, Rey, Sarah, Joe, Sandy
Other Participants: Barbara (DPD), Cheryl (DPD), Comfort (DPD)

Daily Summary: Today's focus was to begin connecting instructional strategies to cognitive demand. We began by re-watching a video from Nicole's classroom, followed by a video club style discussion of it. We focused on these lenses:

  1. Using evidence from the video, what do students understand about the mathematics
  2. The Cognitive Demand Framework. The video also sparked many "I wonder" statements from participants, on topics such as assessment and making instructional choices. We highlighted the big ideas from yesterday's readings (Cog Demand and Video Club), and then concluded our day by working on the Border Problem task as a group.

HW: Read CH2 and CH3 from "Connecting Math Ideas" by Boaler and Humphries
Summary By: Nicole

Date: Thursday July 5, 2007

SSTP Participants: Nicole, Connie, Kelley, Bree, Mitch, Amy, Angie, Rey, Sarah, Joe, Sandy
Other Participants: Barbara (DPD), Comfort (DPD)

Daily Summary: Today we created a list of teacher moves or "instructional choices." We then watched the videos for Border Problem I & II. Our discussion involved issues pertaining to culture and gender. How do instructional choices impact cognitive demand?
We discussed these ideas:

  • Teacher position
  • Questioning techniques
  • Assigning competence to students' ideas
  • Hand-raising as a tool
  • Pause / Wait time

These are just a few. We will take pictures of the entire list.
Readings are from Elizabeth Cowen
We will be working on status tomorrow.
Summary By: Kelley

Date: Friday July 6, 2007

SSTP Participants: Nicole, Connie, Kelley, Bree, Mitch, Amy, Angie, Rey, Sarah, Joe, Sandy
Other Participants: Barbara (DPD), Cheryl (DPD), Comfort (DPD)

Daily Summary: We started out by taking a few minutes to review the reading from the night before. We discussed groupwork/status in the classroom. There were a lot of questions: what can we do about low status students? how does groupwork help/hurt status issues? how can we keep students motivated in groups? how do we assign groups? how often? (and lots more). We watched an Elizabeth Cohen video showing status issues in classrooms and then discussed what we noticed.
Summary By: Connie

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