The Cycle: Enactment with Buddies & Analysis
Enactments with Elementary Student "Buddies"
Following the observation, analysis, preparation, and rehearsal of an IA, NTs enact the planned activity in small groups with their elementary student buddies. The goal of these enactments is to provide a bounded space within which NTs engage with the challenges and possibilities of teaching real students—the in-the-moment decision making necessary to support varied student participation and to make the details of children’s thinking explicit. Novices get to work on, for example: opening moves that invite children's varied resources into the space, eliciting and responding to children’s thinking, representing children’s ideas, orienting children to others’ ideas, etc.
While each group has collaboratively planned the IA, typically a single NT will serve as the lead teacher for the day’s activity. The other NTs act as participant observers — listening in and occasionally supporting partner talk. The debrief conversation that follows each enactment is critical to the work of our courses -- NTs reflect with each other upon what they are learning about their buddies and about teaching, and the TE supports them to make use of these reflections in the next iteration of the cycle.
“My classes have helped me realize that learning is mostly about having deep and meaningful conversations with other learnings that expand our thinking. I see this in the ways that our university classes are taught to us as graduate students and in the way that my methods classes have taught me to interact with elementary students. Getting to hear students’ thinking and watching them share their thinking with their peers is my favorite part of teaching.” -Adam (TEP 2018-2020)
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