Strategic Education Research Partnership
WT Grant Research-Practice Partnership
Meeting
April 30, 2014
Starting Small
Not a theory: a stage of problem solving
• Word Generation in Boston vs. Word
Generation in New York City
How do you know…
Evidence: Word Generation positive effect on
vocabulary acquisition; positive reports from
teachers.
Partnerships must balance theory and politics
• 5x8 card
• internal coherence protocol
Case Example
Decline in middle grades math performance
• Teacher applicants (12 chosen)
• Exploration of student thinking
• Generation of testable approaches to shifting
to sense-making practices
TAKE 1: TOOLS FOR SENSE-MAKING
STEM:
Offers students a brief description of
some quantitative information.
QUESTION:
For example:
A dragonfly can fly fast. It can go about 50 feet in
two seconds.
Asks student to use the
information in the stem and
apply it to a situation that is
different or more detailed.
For example:
How long would it take for the dragonfly
to go 275 feet?
or
SOLUTION:
Provides “answer” to the question
using the stem’s information, but
also provides insight to how these
types of situations can be handled in
mathematics.
For example:
50 feet/2 seconds indicates a unit rate of 25
feet per second.
275 ÷ 25 = 11
Therefore the dragonfly can fly 275 feet in 11
seconds.
How far could could the dragonfly fly in
11 seconds?
• http://math.serpmedia.org/sense-making/
The Scaling Challenge
• The district mechanism for taking pedagogy to
scale (MSTLI) was defunded
• Sharing practices across teachers was countercultural
• Observations of classrooms suggested bigger
challenges:
– Teacher discomfort with uncertainty
– Sense-making with below grade level math
– Limited capacity to use divergent thinking
Iterative design
• TAKE II: Team of researchers and teachers try
their hand at more fully designed lessons.
Iterative Design
• TAKE III: Formal user-centered design process
to create “poster problems”
• http://math.serpmedia.org/diagnostic_teaching/
Ready for Scale?
• District’s challenge is redefined
– New people
– New context (CCSS-M)
– New challenge (how do we get everyone to
engage in rich math tasks?)
Been there….
• RISE Assessment
• Word Generation
• (STARI?)
• Internal Coherence Survey and Protocol