What if we engage in purposeful instructional talk as a team to focus on the instructional core? How might we design and implement a differentiated action plan across our grade to meet all learners where they are? What if we learn to integrate Smith and Stein’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions?
Becky Holden (@bholden86), our EED math specialist, and I are working on formative assessment using anticipate and monitor, the first two of Smith and Stein’s 5 Practices. While we don’t want a template, we keep using this sketch to plan, think, and share.
It’s still a work in progress. We’d love to know what you think.
Brian Toth (@btoth4thgrade) shared his learners and time with me so that I could play and work with our students on SMP-6, attend to precision.
The following three sketches are the notes and jots of what we anticipate our learners will think and say prior to the start of class.
Our purposeful instructional talk set learning goals of I can attend to precision, and I can demonstrate flexibility to show what I know more than one way. From our students, we are looking for complete sentences with strong vocabulary and word choice. We want to see internal motivation to think deeply and a willingness to go past a surface initial answer. We know that we are growing toward constructing viable arguments. From our team, we are collaborating to learn more about our learners, to become more flexible ourselves, and to notice and note details of student answers so that we can design and implement a differentiated action plan across our grade to meet all learners where they are.
What if we learn and practice together? How might we grow in confidence, competence, precision, and flexibility?
Experiments in Learning by Doing 