TRU

A TRU Guide for Crafting Richer Learning Environment for our Students

There are so many things to attend to when we teach. There’s the day’s specific content and the ideas underlying it; the wide range of students in the classroom; students’ different strengths and the range of knowledge they bring with them; the opportunities the curriculum does and doesn’t provide for the students to connect to big ideas; how to organize classroom activities so that they provide meaningful learning opportunities for as many students as possible; hearing what students say in the moment and reacting to it productively; and more.

Our metaphor for improvement

The target metaphor is a way of visualizing the challenge of planning and executing great lessons. Over the course of a lesson, there are hundreds of interactions – hundreds of metaphorical darts. It’s impossible for all of them to land on bullseyes. Every lesson contains a mix of activity used for different purposes. A focused review, for example, may not offer rich mathematical explorations or extended classroom discussion. The goal isn’t perfection – that’s impossible. The goal is improvement over time, and the continuous enrichment of classroom activities along the five TRU dimensions. You can imagine the sequence of activities in a classroom landing at various places on the targets over the course of a lesson. What do the targets look like at the end of the lesson? There might be a substantial spread on some of the targets, with some activities near the bulls-eyes, some not. Might it be possible to modify the activities so that more of them cluster toward the bulls-eyes? Can we learn from what happens in our classrooms day to day, and better structure our planning and reflections so that our lessons get ever closer to our ambitious instructional goals?

Read through an example of how teachers might use the targets to improve a textbook assignment...

So where do we start – what can we do on a daily basis to make progress as teachers?

The first step is to know what counts in teaching, so you can decide what to focus on. Once you’ve decided where your focus will be, the next step is to have a tool that you can use, with others or by yourself, to plan for and reflect on your teaching in ways that help you learn, on a day by day basis.

But then what? How do those big ideas get translated into day-to-day practice? We offer specific tools, in the form of targets or “bullseyes,” to help with that. Suppose, for example you want to open up tasks so that they remain mathematically rich, but provide more opportunities for more students to dig into them. Where do you start? We list some resources, and some ideas. Then, on the bullseyes you’ll find descriptions of tasks and activities that you can use to analyze what you’re planning, or what happened. As you get closer to the bullseyes you’ll find tasks and activities that are increasingly rich. These serve as serving as pointers to things you might try to make your classroom practice increasingly rich. You can tailor them to focus on what matters most to you. After the lesson, you (and perhaps colleagues or coaches, who either visit the class or watch videos of it) can debrief, reflecting on what worked and what might be done differently next time.