Strategic Education Research Partnership

WT Grant Research-Practice Partnership Meeting

April 30, 2014

Starting Small

Not a theory: a stage of problem solving

• Word Generation in Boston vs. Word Generation in New York City

How do you know…

Evidence: Word Generation positive effect on vocabulary acquisition; positive reports from teachers.

Partnerships must balance theory and politics

• 5x8 card • internal coherence protocol

Case Example

Decline in middle grades math performance

• Teacher applicants (12 chosen)• Exploration of student thinking• Generation of testable approaches to

shifting to sense-making practices

TAKE 1: TOOLS FOR SENSE-MAKING

STEM:

Offers students a brief description of some quantitative information.

For example: A dragonfly can fly fast. It can go about 50 feet in two seconds.

QUESTION:

Asks student to use the information in the stem and apply it to a situation that is different or more detailed.

For example: How long would it take for the dragonfly to go 275 feet?

or

How far could could the dragonfly fly in 11 seconds?

SOLUTION:

Provides “answer” to the question using the stem’s information, but also provides insight to how these types of situations can be handled in mathematics.

For example:

50 feet/2 seconds indicates a unit rate of 25 feet per second.

275 ÷ 25 = 11

Therefore the dragonfly can fly 275 feet in 11 seconds.

• http://math.serpmedia.org/sense-making/

The Scaling Challenge

• The district mechanism for taking pedagogy to scale (MSTLI) was defunded

• Sharing practices across teachers was counter-cultural

• Observations of classrooms suggested bigger challenges:– Teacher discomfort with uncertainty– Sense-making with below grade level math– Limited capacity to use divergent thinking

Iterative design

• TAKE II: Team of researchers and teachers try their hand at more fully designed lessons.

Iterative Design

• TAKE III: Formal user-centered design process to create “poster problems”

• http://math.serpmedia.org/diagnostic_teaching/

Ready for Scale?

• District’s challenge is redefined– New people– New context (CCSS-M)– New challenge (how do we get everyone

to engage in rich math tasks?)

Been there….

• RISE Assessment

• Word Generation

• (STARI?)

• Internal Coherence Survey and Protocol