TRU
The Basics of TRU
Teaching for Robust Understanding
The dimensions are summarized in the table below. Together, they offer a way to organize some of the complexity of teaching so that we can focus our learning together in deliberate and useful ways. They include attention to content, practices, and students’ developing identities as thinkers and learners. There is necessarily some overlap between dimensions; rather than capturing completely distinct categories, each dimension is like a visual filter, highlighting different aspects of the same phenomena in everyday classroom life. We encourage you to think about interactions between dimensions when it is useful for you. The questions on subsequent pages of the Guide will also direct your attention to particular kinds of overlap.
TRU does not tell you how to teach.
There are lots of ways to be an effective teacher – were the two best teachers you had as a student the same? TRU helps you inquire into your teaching practice and reflect on it – preferably as part of a Teachers Learning Community or with a coach or partner teacher.
The big idea is simple. If you work on getting better at the five dimensions, your teaching will become increasingly responsive to your students’ thinking, and your students will learn more.
The five dimensions of the Teaching for Robust Understanding (TRU) framework identify what is important. The idea is to use this information to enrich our classrooms – to establish goals for getting better along each of the five dimensions.
Want to go deeper?
Key Goal for Dimension 1:
Enriching the Mathematics, both content and practices. Let’s look at the activities in the lesson. Can they be made more mathematically deep and connected, providing increased opportunities for student understanding?
Key Goals for Dimension 2:
Finding the Right Levels of Cognitive Demand. Are there ways to open up the mathematics while maintaining mathematical richness, so that more students can build their understandings through “productive struggle?”
Key Goal for Dimension 3:
Providing Meaningful Access to the Mathematics for all Students. Can activities be modified in ways that build on students’ strengths and knowledge, allowing more students to engage in meaningful mathematical sense making?
Key Goal for Dimension 4:
Providing Opportunities for Students to See Themselves as Mathematically Powerful Thinkers and Problem Solvers. Can the mathematics be re-framed or the activities re-shaped, so that students have increased opportunities to reason, conjecture, and solve problems, and to put forth ideas and refine their own and others’ ideas, so they increasingly come to see themselves as mathematical sense makers?
Key Goal for Dimension 5:
Making Student Thinking Public to Support Student Growth in Dimensions 1 Through 4. Can we pose problems, or open up classroom discourse, in ways that make the mathematical work of the class more public – and in doing so, provide increased opportunities to enrich each of the other dimensions?