Working on Content and Pedagogy within an Instructional Activity

How we use Instructional Activities in our Methods Courses

In our methods courses we use a suite of specifically designed Instructional Activities to bring together the details of content and teaching (Lampert, Beasley, Ghousseini, Kazemi, & Franke, 2010; Lampert et al., 2013). By Instructional Activities (IAs) we mean routines that preserve the complexities of teaching while bounding decision-making within a particular structure and time. IAs serve as a container for practice in that they allow for certain aspects of teaching to remain constant (the underlying structure of the activity) while varying others (the mathematics that gets worked on). IAs can be used iteratively by altering the task but preserving the overall form of the activity. Thus, novice teachers (and students) do not need to re-learn a new activity for each lesson, but can make small adjustments to the structure or instructional focus to examine their effects. Reflecting on these decisions supports novices to begin to learn from their teaching and from their students.

The set of instructional activities (IAs) we use in our methods courses allow for our novice teachers (NTs) to engage with important content within literacy and math through their teaching with children. In planning, rehearsing, and enacting each instructional activity NTs consider the range of ways that children may participate, and the content understandings that underlie various responses. Our focus is on how each IA provides openings for children with varied understandings to participate, and how NTs take up and extend the details of the content that emerge.

Math Example: Choral Counting

For example Choral Counting is an IA used in our math methods course. In Choral Counting, the teacher engages a group of students in counting together while recording the count on the board or chart paper. The teacher elicits strategies for counting, invites students to share what they notice about the numbers in the count, and facilitates a discussion based on students’ ideas (Turrou, Franke, & Johnson, 2017). A specific component of the activity involves eliciting children’s strategies for getting to the next number in the count. For example, when counting by 12s the teacher might decide to pause and elicit strategies after noticing that some voices have dropped out of the count after reaching 96. As students share how they could get to the next number, they might share the following strategies:

· Counting on (12 more) by ones, keeping track on your fingers

· 96 + 4 -> 100 + 8 -> 108

· 96 + 10 ->106 + 2 -> 108

· 90 + 10 = 100; 6 + 2 = 8; 100 + 8 = 108

A primary goal of checking in on strategies is to make public ways of continuing the count so as to support ongoing participation from each student. But as the strategies above make clear, this component of the activity also serves to bring to life ideas about the development of children’s thinking encountered elsewhere in the course. Specifically, the examples above are particular instances of Counting On, Incrementing, and Combining Same Units strategies for adding multidigit numbers (Carpenter, Fennema, Franke, Levi, & Empson, 2015). The goal is not for novices to name or classify strategies in their work with students, but rather to work on the details of eliciting, representing, and orienting children to each other’s ideas. One of the affordances of our IAs are to create these opportunities to engage in the details of the content within a small, manageable space of the lesson.

Literacy Example: Small-Group Reading

Based on the work of Jennifer Seravillo (2010), Small-Group Reading provides differentiated reading instruction to help children to:

• Read with engagement and enthusiasm

• Read strategically

• Engage in meaningful conversations about books

• Read fluently and with expression

• Read increasingly more challenging texts

Students are flexibly grouped and may be learning together for just one session or more depending on the instructional goal for the group. The teacher helps students develop an understanding of the text while prompting them to apply decoding and comprehension strategies they will need to become independent readers. During a small group reading session, the teacher will follow a predictable, but flexible routine:

• Connect and Compliment: Tell the children why they’ve been pulled together, reinforce a strength, and state a strategy for today’s lesson

• Teach through demonstration, shared practice, example, or explanation

• Engage students to practice the strategy within their independent reading book or another text

• Invite students to continue working independently, applying and reapplying the strategy practiced in new contexts

A small reading group might start with the teacher saying something like this:

Hi Everyone. We just finished our National Geographic for Kids book on Volcanoes and you have all done so well figuring out what the most important ideas from each chapter were as we went along Now that we are finished reading, one way to retell a book is to flip through the pages as you are talking to help us remember and say one quick sentence for an important idea from each chapter. So I would look at this first chapter (opens to the page and shows the book) and say that an erruption is when melted rock called magma is forced out of the earth's surface. Let's work together and retell the book by taking turns saying one sentence for each chapter with the most important idea as I flip through the book.

Small-group reading has the added benefits of helping children build reading relationships with each other, as well as helping teachers work more efficiently. When children are part of a group with a common goal, it makes it more likely that they will reach out to peers when they encounter difficulty. Small groups give children the chance to hear other students’ thinking about their reading process and responses to text. Students then follow up the lesson by practicing in independent-level texts or teacher-chosen texts.

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