From students work independently, listening and responding mainly to the teacher…
To students work collaboratively, listening and responding to each other
Learning is a social activity and finding ways for students to have authentic exchanges about their thinking can lead to deeper learning. The Practices provide many opportunities for students to work together in productive ways.
Working collaboratively helps students identify and connect the thinking of others to their own. Here are some of the reasons we think this is important:
1. It helps students formulate and clarify ideas that might not have been fully thought through.
2. Students develop communication skills that will serve them well in other contexts (e.g. in a future job environment).
3. Students realize that others often have the same questions that they do, which might encourage more questioning by students.
4. Instead of depending on the teacher as the source of all knowledge, they recognize the value of other students' ideas.
When students hear multiple ways to view or understand a concept:
1. They might be confronted with ideas that challenge their own.
2. They learn that comparing alternative ideas or perspectives could be useful for deepening the understanding of a given idea.
3. They learn that comparing multiple methods or models of phenomena could reveal general concepts or patterns that help them make sense of their learning.
Reasons students might learn better from hearing each other’s perspective:
1. Students might benefit from hearing it in the language of their peers rather than the teacher’s.
2. Students can “fill in the gaps” for each other and illuminate different aspects of the same concept in ways that teachers cannot.
Working with the Practices in our classrooms has helped us see what productive student collaboration can look like. The practice of math or science is inherently social. As we have used the Practices more and more in our classrooms we have seen the power of student interaction.
Scaffolding student interactions is a good way to help students make public their ideas, build upon each other’s ideas, ask questions of each other, critique the reasoning of their peers, argue from evidence, and construct explanations as a collaborative endeavor. The ultimate goal is have the students asking these questions of each other and responding to each other’s ideas.
Before students can build upon or evaluate the ideas of their peers, students need to first understand each other's ideas and the justification used to support those ideas.
1. Questions that help clarify the understanding of an idea
A. "Is this what I'm hearing you say?"
B. "I don't understand this part of your idea."
2. Questions that elicit students’ justification for their ideas
A. "What makes you say that? How did you get that?"
B. "Can you explain why you think your answer makes sense?"
C. "How could we test that?"
D. "What does ____ have to do with _____?"
3. Questions that elicit and compare alternative ideas or explanations
A. "Can anyone respond to/build on that idea?
B. "What might be another explanation/way to solve that problem? Do you think something different?"
C. "What is the same and different about the strategies?"
D. "Did this reveal something we hadn’t seen before?"
E. "How is it possible that both can be true?"
Students should evaluate arguments using evidence and consider means to test those ideas.
Role of the Teacher: During these discussions, the teacher is not a passive observer. Instead, the teacher is actively tracking the conversation to identify important issues that students need to consider and reinforce norms that facilitate the students' role in this work.
1. Give students the chance to answer questions or consult with others before providing your insight.
2. Positively reinforce examples of productive student conversation. For example, when students build upon each other's ideas, publicly recognize it by saying, “I like the way Kathy just built on Ingrid’s idea”.