The analysis: What i learned from Term III
For each of my lessons, I used a different model of partnerships to promote differentiation. Below is a brief summary of each model and some observations:
What overall conclusions and lessons can I draw from these experiences? Most importantly, I feel quite strongly that these lessons demonstrate the value of partner collaboration, particularly towards the goal of differentiated instruction to support a heterogeneous group of students.
These lessons time and again demonstrated some of the values inherent in this model of classroom work. I saw evidence of students distributing tasks in a way that I believe contributed to their ability to focus on the lesson content – for instance, students reading together in the Literacy assignment, or one student designated to write for both in Science. These two examples are valuable in different ways. In the case of the Science lesson, the writing task was primarily there to help students organize their observations and classifications, which they would eventually need to return to for later components of the lesson; the actual writing was not a component of the lesson, but merely a tool to support learning on other subjects. Therefore, partner delegation served as a mechanism that allowed students who would struggle to use that tool themselves the opportunity to focus primarily on the lesson content while still having access to the tool further along (the counterpoint scenario to this was in the Math lesson, where one student’s struggles with the writing task – which was designed to provide easy reference for the next activity – impaired his efficiency, his focus, and likely his motivation, for the math tasks). With the Literacy lesson, meanwhile, reading was an important part of the content; however, rather than delegating the reading entirely (so one student was reading and the other was doing something else), both students were looking at the text while one read aloud, something which I believe was supporting both students’ literacy development.
One major area of learning for me – which I am still trying to draw conclusions from – had to do with the role of specific guidelines for partner work. I entered the lessons with the idea that I would need to provide very specific instructions to govern partner work, to ensure that students were collaborating effectively (as opposed to, for instance, one student doing “all the work” while the other is distracted, uninterested, or unwelcomed to participate). In some of my lessons, I created distinctions – sometimes meaningful, sometimes fairly arbitrary – to enforce this. With Science, I mandated that, during the classification activity, each time they sorted the rocks, one student would be responsible for physically sorting and the other would be responsible for recording the data. With Literacy, I mandated that, when one student was writing, the other student must be holding the book (a fairly arbitrary division of labor built around the assumption that, if the students were working in close proximity, they would be more likely to be collaborating).
In practice, however, I didn’t end up thoroughly enforcing these rules, nor did I feel like I needed to. Students in all of my groups (excepting Math) slipped quite quickly into earnest collaboration; I rarely felt the need to encourage students to work together on anything. However, I think it was still a good idea to provide the guidelines; that way, if a pair is working successfully as a pair, I can allow them some flexibility, but if a pair is not collaborating, I can remind them of the guidelines. Having a specified model of partner interaction seems like a scaffold that will be particularly valuable for a class that is not used to this sort of work. I’m reminded of the Literature Circles model of reading groups we discussed in our Literature for Children and Adolescents class over the summer; in this model, student roles are specified and carefully distinguished, but ideally as students become more comfortable with the sorts of discussions the model promotes, they can become substantially more flexible and ultimately take control of changing or even scrapping the assignments. In addition to being valuable at the beginning of the year, it seems like this sort of structured partner interactions will make it easier to work with partner activities in a whole-class setting, where I might not be able to assess and enforce collaboration across the classroom.
Perhaps the most important change I would make in applying these strategies to future work as a teacher is that I would be much more thoughtful and strategic in constructing my pairs. That’s not to say that I wasn’t extremely thoughtful and strategic in constructing groups for these lessons – as this photo should testify, I spent a LOT of time grouping and regrouping my students.
- In Science, partners compared rocks and practiced classification. In this lesson, I observed that students shared their thinking and strategies with one another, and all partners at various points challenged and discussed their partners’ reasoning in productive ways. Students shifted tasks among themselves effectively: students who were more comfortable with writing took on the higher portion of writing tasks, but all partners were engaged in the reasoning and activities of the lesson.
- In Literacy, partners skimmed texts to find relevant content, then wrote information which they found in answer to an overarching question (“What food chains can you find in different settings?”). I observed some pretty amazing collaboration between readers substantially above- and below-grade level. In one pair, both students were looking at pictures and discussing them while the more proficient reader was doing more of the text-reading (with the other student following along), in a way that seemed to be supporting both of their literacy learning; in the other pair, one student would read aloud paragraphs as the other student looked on; the other student then offered to write the information they were finding, and the first student proceeded to help her with spelling.
- In Social Studies, partners had to rank a series of scenarios (written on sticky notes) according to how “fair” students thought they were (placing them on the wall to visually depict their rankings). Students discussed their reasoning continuously and often thoroughly, challenging each other respectfully and asking questions. Although all students seemed comfortable reading the notes, they did in many cases delegate specific tasks (e.g. one student reading the notecard aloud, the other student commenting, the first student placing it, the second student sometimes arguing and ultimately moving it). Importantly, it became clear that even when one student was doing most of the reading, both of the students were paying attention and discussing their decisions and reasoning.
- In Math, I had a whole sequence of partner tasks around measurement…which I never got to implement because students had a much more preliminary understanding of the material than I had anticipated, and therefore I ended up improvising a series of mini-lessons and activities that were never quite partner-based. While I did have students sharing materials and verbally encouraged them to work together in some cases, collaboration was low – likely because they weren’t performing a task that was authentically structured to be collaborative. There were signs, however, that collaboration could have been quite beneficial to some students. For instance, one student (who is at a much lower reading level than his peers) was clearly stressed out about filling out his worksheet, and even omitted an answer that he had gotten correct; a collaborative version of this task could have allowed his partner to do the writing so that the student could focus more on the math.
What overall conclusions and lessons can I draw from these experiences? Most importantly, I feel quite strongly that these lessons demonstrate the value of partner collaboration, particularly towards the goal of differentiated instruction to support a heterogeneous group of students.
These lessons time and again demonstrated some of the values inherent in this model of classroom work. I saw evidence of students distributing tasks in a way that I believe contributed to their ability to focus on the lesson content – for instance, students reading together in the Literacy assignment, or one student designated to write for both in Science. These two examples are valuable in different ways. In the case of the Science lesson, the writing task was primarily there to help students organize their observations and classifications, which they would eventually need to return to for later components of the lesson; the actual writing was not a component of the lesson, but merely a tool to support learning on other subjects. Therefore, partner delegation served as a mechanism that allowed students who would struggle to use that tool themselves the opportunity to focus primarily on the lesson content while still having access to the tool further along (the counterpoint scenario to this was in the Math lesson, where one student’s struggles with the writing task – which was designed to provide easy reference for the next activity – impaired his efficiency, his focus, and likely his motivation, for the math tasks). With the Literacy lesson, meanwhile, reading was an important part of the content; however, rather than delegating the reading entirely (so one student was reading and the other was doing something else), both students were looking at the text while one read aloud, something which I believe was supporting both students’ literacy development.
One major area of learning for me – which I am still trying to draw conclusions from – had to do with the role of specific guidelines for partner work. I entered the lessons with the idea that I would need to provide very specific instructions to govern partner work, to ensure that students were collaborating effectively (as opposed to, for instance, one student doing “all the work” while the other is distracted, uninterested, or unwelcomed to participate). In some of my lessons, I created distinctions – sometimes meaningful, sometimes fairly arbitrary – to enforce this. With Science, I mandated that, during the classification activity, each time they sorted the rocks, one student would be responsible for physically sorting and the other would be responsible for recording the data. With Literacy, I mandated that, when one student was writing, the other student must be holding the book (a fairly arbitrary division of labor built around the assumption that, if the students were working in close proximity, they would be more likely to be collaborating).
In practice, however, I didn’t end up thoroughly enforcing these rules, nor did I feel like I needed to. Students in all of my groups (excepting Math) slipped quite quickly into earnest collaboration; I rarely felt the need to encourage students to work together on anything. However, I think it was still a good idea to provide the guidelines; that way, if a pair is working successfully as a pair, I can allow them some flexibility, but if a pair is not collaborating, I can remind them of the guidelines. Having a specified model of partner interaction seems like a scaffold that will be particularly valuable for a class that is not used to this sort of work. I’m reminded of the Literature Circles model of reading groups we discussed in our Literature for Children and Adolescents class over the summer; in this model, student roles are specified and carefully distinguished, but ideally as students become more comfortable with the sorts of discussions the model promotes, they can become substantially more flexible and ultimately take control of changing or even scrapping the assignments. In addition to being valuable at the beginning of the year, it seems like this sort of structured partner interactions will make it easier to work with partner activities in a whole-class setting, where I might not be able to assess and enforce collaboration across the classroom.
Perhaps the most important change I would make in applying these strategies to future work as a teacher is that I would be much more thoughtful and strategic in constructing my pairs. That’s not to say that I wasn’t extremely thoughtful and strategic in constructing groups for these lessons – as this photo should testify, I spent a LOT of time grouping and regrouping my students.
Nevertheless, while I devoted a lot of work to student groupings – taking into account student preference (I let them all choose top two choices among my four lesson groups), formal assessments (DRA reading levels, math assessments) as well as informal assessments (observations, conversations with their classroom teacher), and personal judgment on which students might cooperate well with each other – I believe that the task of determining how students should be grouped is one which should draw on a much more thorough, ongoing process of assessment.
In saying this, I am drawing largely on the writings of Fountas and Pinnell (1996), who argue for flexible grouping of students based primarily on assessed need with relation to the particular skills being taught in lessons. Their writing both forms an underpinning to my perspective on collaboration for differentiation – arguing that dynamic groupings that are heterogeneous and responsive to specific needs and contexts (rather than static groupings based on an impression of overall proficiency) are much more supportive for all students than the alternative – and also provides guidance for how this can be achieved. Rather than teaching my Literacy lesson in a strategically decontextualized way, for example, the writings of Fountas and Pinnell leads me to want to teach that lesson specifically to a group of students – across reading levels – whom I assess would benefit from the particular strategies being taught in this lesson. Meanwhile, a lesson like my Math lesson would be more successful if I came into it familiar with the particular understandings of the students in the class. In this case, I would then have a choice: I could either pair students with similar misunderstandings or unfamiliarity with a particular concept (regardless of math proficiency otherwise); or, I could deliberately pair students at different points along the process of developing their understandings of these concepts, to support the less-proficient student and challenge the more-proficient student to explain and model. Either of these could be valuable; both of them require a concentrated effort on my own part to develop a specific and nuanced understanding of each students’ proficiency and comfort level across the curriculum.
With all of this in mind, I find that some tasks for myself for the coming semester become quite clear. I will continue to investigate the use of partners and other models of collaborative work across my lesson planning; although in practice this collaboration may look quite qualitatively different in a kindergarten classroom than a third-grade classroom, I am eager to learn what mechanisms for collaboration will be most appropriate and effective in my new environment. I will take advantage of my greatly increased classroom presence to try to get a much more thorough view of individual student understandings in the classroom. Finally, using what I learned from Term III and my fall classes, I will attempt to use my more nuanced knowledge of student proficiencies to craft partner and small-group activities that make use of flexible, heterogeneous grouping to support the learning and active engagement of all students.
Fountas, I.C. & Pinnell, G.S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
In saying this, I am drawing largely on the writings of Fountas and Pinnell (1996), who argue for flexible grouping of students based primarily on assessed need with relation to the particular skills being taught in lessons. Their writing both forms an underpinning to my perspective on collaboration for differentiation – arguing that dynamic groupings that are heterogeneous and responsive to specific needs and contexts (rather than static groupings based on an impression of overall proficiency) are much more supportive for all students than the alternative – and also provides guidance for how this can be achieved. Rather than teaching my Literacy lesson in a strategically decontextualized way, for example, the writings of Fountas and Pinnell leads me to want to teach that lesson specifically to a group of students – across reading levels – whom I assess would benefit from the particular strategies being taught in this lesson. Meanwhile, a lesson like my Math lesson would be more successful if I came into it familiar with the particular understandings of the students in the class. In this case, I would then have a choice: I could either pair students with similar misunderstandings or unfamiliarity with a particular concept (regardless of math proficiency otherwise); or, I could deliberately pair students at different points along the process of developing their understandings of these concepts, to support the less-proficient student and challenge the more-proficient student to explain and model. Either of these could be valuable; both of them require a concentrated effort on my own part to develop a specific and nuanced understanding of each students’ proficiency and comfort level across the curriculum.
With all of this in mind, I find that some tasks for myself for the coming semester become quite clear. I will continue to investigate the use of partners and other models of collaborative work across my lesson planning; although in practice this collaboration may look quite qualitatively different in a kindergarten classroom than a third-grade classroom, I am eager to learn what mechanisms for collaboration will be most appropriate and effective in my new environment. I will take advantage of my greatly increased classroom presence to try to get a much more thorough view of individual student understandings in the classroom. Finally, using what I learned from Term III and my fall classes, I will attempt to use my more nuanced knowledge of student proficiencies to craft partner and small-group activities that make use of flexible, heterogeneous grouping to support the learning and active engagement of all students.
Fountas, I.C. & Pinnell, G.S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.