Project Zero Classroom Day 4

Wow!  What a week!  Things are beginning to wind down here in Cambridge and will culminate tomorrow when Tina Blythe and David Perkins, both of the Project Zero team, give a talk on "Giving Change Legs," which I believe will help us to utilize many of the awesome things we have learned here this week.  First I included a few pictures. Then I include some discussion on the course "All Learners Learning Every Day."

Some of the Project Zero courses and plenary session were held on the law school campus.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is a short walk from the Cambridge Common.

Harvard Square

HGSE motto

Downtown Boston

Little Italy

All Learners Learning Every Day (ALL-ED) by Rhonda Bondie
Key takeaways:

• ALL-ED defines differentiated instruction in terms of teacher decision making.
• "Differentiated instruction is a continuous teacher decision making process where teachers search for and respond to academic diversity that will either impede or strengthen effective learning within a community.
• Structures for classroom routines (see figure 1 below):
  • Note the effect that explicit instruction has on student autonomy and student engagement
  • As the structures change, students become more engaged, which isn't surprising.  However, the wow moment for me was the white dashed line that represents teacher thinking time - as structures in the classroom drift away from explicit instruction, teachers have more time to think about how the lesson is proceeding so they can make informed decisions about what to do next.

Figure 1

• A visual describing the learning that happens in a classroom.  If a classroom is primarily set up for 'independent' or 'direct instruction (DI)' learning,  student engagement and autonomy is low, and the teacher does not have as much time to think about the path of the learning.  There certainly is a place for those types of learning, but they cannot be the driving force in a classroom.

• There are 3 forms of differentiation, based on the goal, materials, & assessment.  When most of us hear 'differentation', we automatically think of the third option of different goals, different assessments, and materials, when in fact there are two other types. 

• One interesting method to group kids that I learned in this session was called a triad method of grouping.  In the figure below, you can see a number surrounded by the letters A, B, & C.  The number is the group number.  The letters are where each group member puts their foot and it is their spot in the triad.  One way to use this is to put these sheets around the room (there were ten of them in this session), and then have the class get up and move to a triad sheet; the students would pick a sheet at some place around the room, and put their foot at their letter.  This is one quick way to group the students while giving them a choice in doing so.  Our instructor said that she left her triad sheets around the classroom all year long - it just became part of the routine.

A triad sheet that can be used for easy grouping of students, while giving them a choice; student choice was a common theme of this session.

• One of the best parts about this session was about student choice.  Rhonda believed that giving choice to students makes the students part of the learning instead of being just an observer.  She gave a nice example from a math class.  The students were learning about fitting a line to a set of points.  One option would have been for the teacher to use direction instruction to explain the concept.  Instead the teacher gave the students 15 minutes and during that time they had the choice to do one or more of the following: 1) look at the steps to fitting a line to a set of points (the steps were written on chart paper and posted in the classroom, 2) brainstorm with a partner on how to do this process using the graphing calculator 3) watch a video playing at the front of the room that shows somebody doing the steps for line fitting.  The students knew that at the end of the fifteen minutes that they would be held accountable for that learning, but they had a choice in how they attained that learning.  Please watch this video which shows the teacher giving the students this choice in their learning: