Implementation Lesson Design Investigatestudents’ thinkingas they engage with difficult tasks Systematically incorporate difficulttasks Test assumptionsabout student thinking using evidence Always interactwith students 1-on-1 to hear reasoning during class Collectevidenceof student thinking from many if not all students Representative samples of student thinking mitigate bias Difficult tasks: 1. create opportunities for learning 2. reveal deep vs superficial learning Evidence of student thinking helps me design difficult tasks Assumptions about student thinking are hypotheses that need testing Hearing student reasoning provides valuable insights and should be prioritized Henry Systematically incorporate tasks to elicit evidence of what students find difficult and why Difficult tasks reveal what students find difficult and why
Implementation Lesson Design Evaluate students’ thinking as they engage with tasks Opportunistically incorporate difficult tasks Interact 1 - on - 1 with student reasoning as time allows (e.g., in class, office hours) Assess class performance summatively Hearing student reasoning is aspirational but often impractical Biases stem from hearing only a few students June Incorporate tasks that allow evaluation of students’ thinking Difficult tasks: 1. prepare students for exams 2. engage students’ attention
Teaching Knowledge Teaching Practice “and I know” “so, I must” KEY

1. "Unless you actually struggle through it and try to do it yourself and try to work out how it works, you're just writing stuff down without really understanding."

2. "I think about questions where the answer is not necessarily obvious. I think about the wrench throwing, right? Because wrench throwing is the only way to really figure out the difference between a shallow, algorithmic understanding of something and actually understanding the concept."

"I do not have preset ideas of what students are going to struggle with or not struggle with."

"It is more important to understand what they are thinking and the approach that they are taking than the answer that they put to a question. How the class as a whole does on the question in terms of accuracy is good data, but it does not tell you exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. Even if they are getting there correctly, they could be answering a question for the wrong reason or they could be answering it correctly for the right reason. Different groups might be getting there in different ways, and it would just be helpful for me as an instructor to know all of that information."

"Everything that is happening now is just like me, real-time, getting data on what students are having trouble with and, in the future, then I can use that to make questions that kind of target those ideas and bring them to the forefront a little bit better."

"There is no substitute for getting in the trenches there during class and having lots of conversations with lots of groups over a span of many semesters. Test questions and stuff are assessments to understand learning, but you do not get great sense of why they are doing what they are doing on exams and stuff like that."

Interviewer: Why is it advantageous to hear from many students during class?

Henry: The more data you have, the better job you can do. It is like doing a research study that is incredibly biased towards one group, right? It is not really telling you anything important about the larger group. It is only telling you about that one biased group.

1. "[students] have difficulty when we reach those higher levels of combining concepts together. And so rather than expecting them to just put the individual pieces together and apply it on an exam question, which is kind of what I was expecting them to be able to do last [time I taught the course], [I had] this realization that no, they can't just jump to that. I didn't really prepare them for that."

2. "It helps them stay more engaged in that particular topic if they know that they're like having to answer a question."

June: I did most of the talking and the explaining after they did kind of the easier side of things with the similarities. I felt like I was patient, I left the door open for them to give an answer. But, when the answer wasn't necessarily what I was expecting, I kind of scrambled to be like, "Okay, well let me just tell you the answer."

Interviewer: Why does that stick out to you that you did most of the talking?

June: It's not really forcing their brains to do the work. They're just passively listening to my explanation. It doesn't really give me a peek into their thought process. Maybe I should have paused after my first sentence and said "okay, well what other features do you recognize?"... Kind of prime them more. But, I feel like at this point I was worried about class time... I didn't want to spend too much time on one group, having them think through it.

“When I'm just getting verbal feedback, it's only the people that are confident in their answer that they're speaking up. So, I don't know that that's the best snapshot.”

"In a class of 200 students, it's hard to hear what their logic is. I just have to kind of guess.”