Instructional Activities

Guiding Principles for Choosing Instructional Activities

IAs are Accessible to Novice Teachers

As we engage novice teachers, we find it critical to engage them with IAs that they can readily take up in their student teaching and classrooms. Choosing IAs that are purposefully-bounded, such as a math number sense warm-up or an interactive read-aloud, provides a entry point for novices to not feel like they need to re-invent entire instructional blocks (a daunting task for any educator trying something new) but rather work on getting better at practice within a focused portion of their teaching. An important part of accessibility for novice teachers is how accessible the IA is for students; we select IAs that we find to be engaging and inviting to students and support a range of participation.

IAs are Well-Situated to Disrupt Deficit Narratives

Especially in schools that serve marginalized communities, it is common that math and reading instruction are set up with narrow expectations of participation and success. This has historically led to deficit narratives that students of color lack the knowledge and skill to succeed academically. Our IAs seek to disrupt these deficit narratives in two ways – by providing multiple entry points for students to participate and by helping teachers prioritize focus on what children know and can do.

IAs Position Novice Teachers to Learn about Children’s Thinking

We know that the goal of our methods courses is not to teach novices everything that they will need to know, but rather to set them up on a long-term journey where they learn from their students and further their own content knowledge by attending to the details of children’s thinking. Our IAs are designed to support NTs to elicit to and respond to children’s thinking, such that each enactment of an IA provides a new, rich opportunity for novices to attend to and learn about children’s thinking.

IAs Support Connections across Content

We focus a portion of our methods courses on a subset of IAs that serve as a bridge between mathematics and reading instruction. That is, we use the same IA across math and reading and organize our courses to help novices see where they might draw from their content expertise in another area. Read more about this here.

Note: This is just a brief list of Instructional Activities we used in our most recent year. For more information about these IAs, visit our content-specific pages -- Reading Methods and Math Methods -- and Shared IAs Across Math and Literacy.