From seeing students as blank slates...
To remembering that every student brings a unique set of experiences and interpretations that influence their learning
Students come to our classrooms with ideas and ways of thinking based on their life experiences. They are not blank slates and their previous experiences act as lenses or filters for learning. As teachers we need to remember that each student is unique with useful ideas and life experience that we can leverage in our classrooms.
One approach to learning shows that little by little, experience by experience, people consciously and unconsciously construct their own understanding of the world. Engaging in the practices in science and math classrooms is one important way that students can build understanding over time. This construction is a complex web of information, experiences, and interpretations. It is a unique mix for each student, and it acts as a lens or filter through which the student tries to make sense of the world. As a teacher we need to uncover and attend to the ideas and thinking our students bring to the classroom. This is an important shift if we really want to engage students in the practices because once we really embrace this idea we can build opportunities for students to use their prior knowledge in productive ways.
When students encounter new information, we often see one of these things happen:
1. Good fit: The new information agrees with or fits well into their current understanding, and the student may incorporate the information into their current mental construction. If this happens, their world view has just grown.
2. Revision: The new information challenges their current understanding in a compelling way (i.e. the student discovers that the new makes more sense than the old), the student may revise their current mental construct to account for the new information. Their world view has just been revised.
3. Rejection: If the new information challenges their current understanding but is not compelling or understandable, the student may reject the new information. Their world view has not changed.
Students sometimes have little awareness of their own ideas and mental processing. So if we care about what kids know and understand we have to first think about what ideas they are drawing upon and their interpretations of what is happening or what they are hearing or reading. Teaching with the practices means that students are really thinking and participating in their own learning. As teachers we need to remember the importance of their unique experiences and provide opportunities for them to bring their ideas out and examine them.
Strategies to make students’ ideas and reasoning visible:
Provide students the opportunity to construct initial ideas or explanations either individually or in small groups. This provides the opportunity for students to consider what they do know in order to construct a reasonable account of the phenomenon or solution to a mathematical problem. Give them a chance to think early in the learning process, not only after they have sat through a lecture or seen a procedure for approaching a math problem.
Ask students to create an external representation of their ideas. In doing so, the students can explore their ideas and have a product that can be used to share their ideas with others.
Use prompts to elicit students’ ideas and rationales. The purpose for these prompts is to help students clarify and make public their own ideas for others to understand. However, the expectation is not for students to use precise academic language yet. Example prompts include the following:
General Conversation
1. "What do you think?"
2. "What makes you say that? How do you know?"
Student product
1. "What does ____ represent in your diagram/drawing/graph/table?"
2. "How does this [representation] represent the question/phenomenon that we’re trying to explain?"