Portillo Week 3 Blog Post

This week, we uncovered new ideas to unlock prior student knowledge, encourage classroom discourse, and adapt our instruction to elicit students' ideas. Russ and Sherin share the importance of contextualizing concepts, probing student responses, and seeding new ways of thinking during student interviews. AST gives an example set of norms for a safe classroom because "talking is a form of thinking" which makes their ideas public, and can be a resource for other students. We are also given a set of discourse moves to further elicit responses. AST identifies rich tasks and gives information on eliciting observations and hypothesis of an event, as well as pressing for observations.



The main themes of the articles and my thinking revolve around using probing questions, both in student interviews and in the classroom, in order to elicit student ideas in a safe environment.



There is a very strong relationship in these themes across the articles. Even in my current school, there is a strong focus on effective questioning. It is interesting to me that this idea spans in all areas of student engagement, both in the classroom and in student interviews. The hardest part for my classmates and I seems to be the continuation of questions without providing answers. This allows the students to productively struggle and truly work with the material rather than acquiring it and memorizing it. One of these methods that AST mentions is I-R-E, where teachers simply ask questions to elicit a short response. Rather, the focus is to create an environment where academic discussions are allowed to thrive. I need to recreate norms that allow my students to see the importance of talking in an academic way so that conversation can be used as a resource.

This same theme of questioning, to a degree, should occur in student interviews. One huge difference is that students in these interviews should not receive affirmation of their response from the teacher. This allows the teacher to gauge the student’s thoughts about a topic before teaching it. The questions for these interviews should cause students to think about the event without the teacher having to explicitly state what it happening. By using high-quality questioning in our lessons, we can ensure that our instruction is student driven and merely facilitated by teachers.

I have been trying to implement higher level questions into every lesson and work that I give my students. After reading these readings, I attempted to get the students to carry a class conversation about what happens in a chemical reaction, such as vinegar and baking soda. By simply allowing them to talk, I was able to see what they understand and any alternative conceptions that they had. I was then able to ask more probing questions in response to their thinking.

Ex. "I believe that the baking soda dissolves in the vinegar."
"So the baking soda disappears?"
"No, the vinegar changes and the baking soda changes. Their, like, chemicals change and a gas it released."

This served as a great hook for our lesson on physical vs chemical changes, especially after conducting the experiment after the discussion and asking the same questions again.