Key ideas

In the past, teaching has been described as a profession where practice is “privatized,” that is, where instructional decisions are largely left to individual teachers to make and where opportunities to observe colleagues teach are limited (Little, 1990; Lortie, 1975).

The process of making practice visible to peers is aided when teachers can develop a common language for describing their practice (Grossman & McDonald, 2008Grossman, P., & McDonald, M. (2008). Back to the future: Directions for research in teaching and teacher education. American Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 184.).

Reaching routines will serve not only as a resource for teachers to use to enable their own collaborative learning but also as a “boundary object” for anchoring discussions where researchers and teachers are both present and discussing how to improve a particular activity.

As specifications of sequences of an IFA, teaching routines can also serve as a resource for instructional design.

To the extent that these resources instantiate principles of how people learn, these routines also make it more likely that the lessons developed will promote student learning. For example, teaching routines that embed into their designs what have been called “quasi-repetitive activity cycles” have been shown to familiarize students with the process of learning from reflection (Schwartz, Lin, Brophy, & Bransford, 1999; Vye, et al., 1998).

ref: pedagogical patterns

Routines are familiar features of classrooms, and remarkably stable and recognizable across large timescales and distances; they form part of the very “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995).

Many routines are enacted principally through classroom discourse, as when teachers pose students a question whose answer is known to the students, students respond, and the teacher evaluates the response (Mehan, 1979).

Classroom formats for organizing student participation in class, such as

• recitation
• small group discussion
• whole-class discussion

are ubiquitous and differ little in structure from subject to subject (Nystrand, Wu, & Gamoran, 2003).

In which teachers pose a question to students, students answer, and the teacher evaluates the response, offers little room for dialogue among students (Mehan, 1979; Wells, 1993).

In science classrooms, the use of this sequence also limits opportunities for students to articulate complex concepts and arguments that are the hallmark of scientific reasoning (Lemke, 1990).

Studies of K-12 teachers’ use of classroom network technologies indicate many teachers use I-R-E sequences with the technology, without much classroom discussion (e.g., Penuel, Boscardin, et al., 2007).

Recurring patterned sequences of interaction that teachers and students jointly enact to organize opportunities for student learning in classrooms.

A resource for structuring student opportunities to learn within lessons. They address known challenges associated with making the most of classroom network technology by

• scaffolding teacher enactment
• enabling contingent teaching
• providing an anchor for expanding practice

Grain size may vary from small part of instructional session, to spanning several days.

Routines encourage dialogic, as opposed to monologic, forms of communication (Bakhtin, 1981; Holquist, 1990). occurs whenever teachers’ and students’ utterances anticipate and respond to one another, and where the course of a conversation cannot easily be predicted ahead of time. (re Hoadley & Enyedy, 1999Hoadley, C. M., & Enyedy, N. (1999). Between information and communication: Middle spaces in computer media for learning. In Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning (30--es).)

Routines are not content or domain-specific, but structured around important epistemological ways of thinking in a domain.

(See also IFAs)

Important to identify which process should be represented - reflect those that are essential to student learning in the domain, and how they can engage in this process through collaboration.

Restrict number of routines focused on critical processes, that can be used repeatedly in classes to engage students.

Don't be over-specific in steps, write at general level, but leave flexibility (also to avoid “over-scripting”).

Moving from generic steps to an instantiation in a lesson or assessment, tailoring to specific concept.

Facilitates re-use of learning processes (Koper, 2003; Schroeder & Spannagel, 2005; Zumbach, Muhlenbrock, Jansen, Reimann, & Hoppe, 2002), by providing a record of interaction that can be used as a guide for enacting processes again so that they can become routine sequences of interaction

Response systems facilitate discussion by providing an anchor (aggregate responses on a shared display) and a set of artifacts to which students can refer in the process of building knowledge (Truong, Griswold, Ratto, & Star, 2002)

Teachers must on the fly decide what to do next in a lesson, based on diagnosis of individuals and classes (Hinds, 2002; Solomon & Morocco, 1999).

• whom to provide feedback to
• oral/written

Even aggregating and analyzing enough data to make an evaluation is challenging.

Systems of technology in which individual devices for students and teachers are connected to a local, or classroom-based network; a mechanism to display contributions of students to the system is usually part of the technology (Penuel, in press).

Research on this technology suggests its potential for dramatically increasing participation of students, facilitated by the ability to

• pose questions to all students simultaneously
• aggregate results
• present them for all to see and discuss (Penuel, et al, 2005)

A technology-supported formative assessment designed to promote student learning through the teacher’s use of diagnostic questioning and contingent teaching techniques.

The adaptive assessment and instructional sequences in IFAs support the practices of eliciting student ideas and using feedback in formative ways to inform decisions about what to do next during instruction.

All IFAs developed for this project adhere to four key principles:

• build from existing curriculum material
  • already widely adopted (IFA's more likely to have impact)
  • evaluated in efficacy trial
  • anchor point - focus not to evaluate but assessments that can be used to adjust instruction

IFA's contain routines and learning processes

IF'a have same components as teaching routines, but tailored to a specific lesson and its learning goals (more specific).

(Harris, 1986)

A student presents a sample of original writing to a teacher or peer, gets feedback, and then revises their paper.

• Begins with an initial effort by the student—planning and producing a draft of his or her own creative or expository writing
• The conference with the teacher or peer is an event where students get feedback, not to make a final judgment on their performance, but to motivate them to make changes to the text to make it clearer, more compelling, more engaging
  • Students are likely to be motivated to revise their writing on the basis of the conference, to the extent that they are motivated by a desire to write for an external audience, a desire that can be enhanced by the very act of the writing conference

Interactive formative assessment:

• concept mapping
• data creating and sharing
• question posing and categorizing
• interpreting images
• designing tests
• predicting

(based on principles from Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn. DC National Academy Press Washington. )