Student Thinking at the Core

• eliciting student thinking 
  
• attending to significant features of that thinking 
• interpreting students' ideas within a developmental framework
• bridging from students' current understandings to more sophisticated understandings

Over the course of four lessons we will explore each element listed above. We will be drawing upon both our own* and others' research,as well as the insights of practicing teachers. 

* We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for their support of the research on which this course is based and the preparation of the materials found here:  "Linking Teacher Preparation to Student Learning in Mathematics and Science", National Science Foundation, Award ID 0554486. 

Lesson 1: Eliciting Student Thinking at the Core (available on August 19)

Goal: Design a better task -- i.e., one that will more effectively get students’ thinking on the table. 

Essential Questions: 

    •    What does it mean to leverage student thinking? 
    •    Why is leveraging student thinking educative? 
    •    How can you design tasks to more effectively elicit student thinking and make students' understandings more visible?  

Assignments: 

• Design a task to effectively elicit student thinking.  
  
• Complete survey.

Lesson 2: Anticipating and Interpreting Student Thinking (available on August 26)

Goal: Locate your students' thinking (elicited in assignment #2) within a developmental framework.  

Essential Questions: 

• What’s the developmental trajectory that links students' current understandings of particular concepts to more sophisticated understandings? 
• What does it mean to locate student thinking within a trajectory of development?

Assignments:  

• Sort the student work you collected from least to most sophisticated. On what basis are you making this judgement?

• Conduct a clinical interview with one or more of your students about a concept in your subject area and hypothesize how those students' understanding might build over time "in the direction of what the expert already knows."* 

*See Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York:  Basic Books, p. 191. See Barb's lecture in Lesson 2 to put this phrase in context)