 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Research
That Matters
The kindergartners sit cross-legged on the classroom floor, hugging themselves, trying hard not to squirm. Around them, a roomful of adults squeeze onto tiny chairs to watch the teacher — a teacher of teachers — explain a story problem in addition. She starts by asking the children to “make five.” Most kids hold up a single hand with five fanned fingers. But one holds up two fingers on one hand and three on the other. The teacher seizes the moment, has them all try it — two on one hand, three on the other. The children count: 1-2-3 and then, aha!, 4- 5. “See,” she says, “we now have two ways of making five.”
The teacher is University of Washington associate professor Elham Kazemi, an instructor skilled at making complex mathematical ideas accessible to every student at every learning level. The adults in the kindergarten classroom are Kazemi’s own students, UW teachers-in-training who’ll work one-on-one with the kindergartners after their lesson. The class is a methods course on teaching elementary school mathematics. The fact that Kazemi is teaching it inside a kindergarten room decorated with alphabet letters and animal cut-outs speaks to the new way of doing business at the UW teacher education program.
“Our students can talk about teaching, and think about teaching. Our job is to get them better at doing teaching,” says Kazemi.
To that end, both the elementary and secondary programs at the UW have moved portions of their methods coursework off-campus and into partner schools, immersing first-quarter teacher education students in the real-time, real-world, on-site learning of an active classroom.
Kazemi helped launch the elementary school initiative, called Studio Days, in 2005. “I wanted to work with young students at the same time as I worked with grownups,” she says. “I wanted to see what my students were seeing.”
In the first Studio Days session, organizers brought 65 UW students, their university supervisors and the head of the UW teacher education program to a partner school where every class was assigned two math problems. One involved straight recall. The other was a story problem. The large UW group observed in all the classrooms, then met to analyze what they’d seen. “We asked them to think about the intellectual nature of the task, about which problem made them think more, which demanded more,“ says Kazemi. “We asked how teachers can interact with kids to keep thinking at high levels, and what they might do that would cause that thinking to disappear.”
That conversation continues four years later as the students she calls her “17th-graders” work inside classrooms to refine questioning strategies and develop understanding of how learning evolves over time. “I am constantly looking for opportunities to see what my students can do successfully as they begin teaching, and how we can start to make it more and more complicated, more and more sophisticated as we go along,” says Kazemi.
UNLIKELY PAIRINGS
The related secondary school initiative, called Mediated Field Experiences, places UW students inside high-school classrooms to interact with teachers and analyze what happens moment-to-moment in the seeming chaos of a classroom.
“Our students need to experience that chaos. It’s where the action is. But they need it in small enough doses that we can get something out of it, talk about it, put frameworks on it, refine interpretations of what’s going on,” says associate professor Ilana Horn, who, like Kazemi, helps her students understand the adaptive skills needed for a real-life classroom.
For ten weeks, inside a high-needs urban school, the UW teacher interns are paired with high-school students utterly unlike them. If UW interns never missed a homework assignment, they are teamed with disorganized students who never quite get around to turning in theirs. If the interns never learned a foreign language, they might be paired with students who have recently immigrated — the better to understand what it’s like to learn math with minimal English skills.
The interns have typically excelled at mathematics and need to see firsthand the challenges that some high-school students encounter. “The idea is to give the interns the sense that classrooms are not filled with ‘mini-thems’ — younger versions of themselves — and to help them understand why some students struggle,” says research assistant and math methods instructor Sunshine Campbell, who works side-by-side with Horn.
“When we first ask why students struggle, the interns usually say it’s because the teacher didn’t do a good enough job of explaining the content,” says Campbell. “It’s hard for them to see why students would ever struggle.”
The Mediated Field Experiences are a model of collaborative give-and-take. The UW students, steeped in best-practice concepts from campus, make careful classroom observations, then join UW faculty, teaching assistants and high-school staff in joint sessions to analyze experiences and co-plan real-life lessons. Instead of simply imagining high schools from the university campus, they’re watching them in real-time. And instead of seeing teaching as something isolated that happens behind closed doors, they view it as the result of a team working together. “They develop the sense that their teaching is going to be a lot better if they work with someone else. It fosters cooperation,” says Horn.
Organizers for these two “boots-on-the-ground” field experiences — Studio Days and Mediated Field Experiences — ensure that everyone benefits, not only UW students and faculty, but classroom teachers and students in partner schools. That means providing added support personnel to allow district teachers and university faculty collaborative planning time. It means having UW interns help with individual assessment and instruction. “The schools start to rely on us. They know they can depend on that extra help,” says Karen Harris, field coordinator for the elementary program. “With 60 UW students in a building working one-on-one with kids, we can really help a child learn a concept in an hour.”
The idea of teaching university methods courses in the field, as the UW faculty has constructed it, is a relatively new one in teacher education. Although many teacher education programs locate some coursework inside schools, few incorporate co-teaching experiences with elementary and high school teachers. To mimic the actual classroom in such situations, teacher educators may show students videos, tell anecdotal stories, examine work done by elementary or high school students, and have students re-enact vignettes of what might happen inside a real classroom.
“Too often we’ve relied on these smooth and unproblematic representations to understand teaching methods,” says Horn. “The thing is, students just don’t realize how fundamental tools and strategies are to getting at student thinking when they’re sitting in a university classroom doing a simulation with a group of people who have college degrees and all like their subject matter.”
Horn and her fellow UW instructors found they needed to be in the schools as well. Without seeing what their students had seen and hearing what they’d heard, UW instructors found themselves with little context for helping interns interpret what they had experienced.
“Our students would come back and report ‘The classroom is really noisy,’ and we’d have to ask ‘What kind of noisy?’ “ says Horn. “There’s the buzz of productive activity, then there’s the no-focus-on-what-is-going-on-in-here noisy. They had no way to distinguish something as basic as that.”
The goal of the Mediated Field Experiences is to help teacher interns learn to see the difference.
THE THIRD SPACE
Engaging classrooms as working laboratories addresses one of the fundamental problems of teacher education — the gap between theory and practice, between big-concept strategies taught on university campuses and the often tangled realities of teaching in modern classrooms, where recently immigrated students may struggle with English, where high-needs students may require special attention and minority students dismissed as “poor learners” may eventually drift off or drift out.
UW faculty members believe that mediated instruction can turn that great divide into “a third space,” a working theory-in-practice space where instructors and students can test ideas, where conversations around teaching have common threads, where concepts taught step-by-step on campus can merge and morph in an instant, and where interns can witness the moment-to-moment decision-making involved in the subtle art of good teaching.
“People who study teacher cognition talk about the sheer number of decisions a teacher makes in a single day, and how often there’s not an obvious right answer. It’s a question of weighing tradeoffs — a very, very complicated kind of thinking,” says Horn, who, with her research team, is documenting her students’ practices as they move from Mediated Field Experiences through student teaching and on into their own classrooms.
Horn and research assistant Campbell cite the example of a mathematics teacher at their partner high school who, realizing her lesson plan wasn’t working, ditched it mid-class and brought her students up to the board to work out a multi-step problem together. The students “passed the pen,” taking turns at the board. One teenage girl in the class, when it was her turn, struggled painfully at the board for five, then ten, then fifteen minutes. The teacher — in a carefully nuanced move designed to push the girl’s understanding and, at the same time, secure her peers’ assessment of her competence — refused to let her to sit down. She had the girl stay until she solved the problem, taking up a significant portion of the 55-minute period, successfully encouraging her to solve the problem.
Students from the UW methods class watching this interaction were dismayed. Wasn’t this bad for the girl’s self-esteem? Why had the teacher wasted so much time? In the debriefing that followed, they pushed the teacher to explain her actions. Recalls Campbell: “She told them, ‘If I had let her sit down, it would have told the class she couldn’t do the problem. I knew she could do this problem. And I wanted to show the entire class that she knew how to do the problem.” By showing her confidence in one student, the teacher demonstrated her confidence in all her students.
Knowing what students are capable of is key to pushing for genuine mathematical argumentation and reasoning — but it’s a skill that often eludes teaching interns. Many come into the UW program with preset and often counterproductive ideas about math: “Whoever finishes fastest is smartest,” “Whoever masters a procedure gets the big picture.” They talk of “high” students and “low” students who may never “get it.” They haven’t learned yet that most all students can grasp ideas if they are presented multiple access points to learning. That may mean talking in groups, solitary drawing, building models, acting something out — or working with blocks.
Horn tells the story of one UW intern who was extremely skeptical about using rods, cubes, tiles, blocks, and other hands-on manipulatives in mathematics. He dismissed these tools as “babyish.” During Mediated Field Experiences, he was paired with an English language learner who was so quiet no one paid her much attention in class. “When the teacher introduced manipulatives as a way to work on mathematics, the ideas clicked and she got it better than anyone in her group. She flew!” says Horn. “Our student couldn’t stop talking about it. He saw this student transform before his eyes.”
This, Horn points out, would not have happened on campus, in a simulated class, with first-quarter teacher education students role-playing — miles from a challenging classroom that most could barely begin to imagine.
