In the last lecture, I talked about a number of resources that are available largely online that can provide insights into issues and challenges in creating and implementing constructivist learning environments. But simply considering these resources individually can be very very challenging, and I think that the insights from these resources can really come alive through professional collaborations, and I'd like to talk about that in this lecture. One example of a professional collaboration that I've already talked about is graduate classes. So this is a kind of professional collaboration where for example in this class you have a discussion board where you can talk with your classmates about various ideas and share your ideas and begin to develop insights together. In the other MOOCs that are a part of this sequence will provide also similar learning experiences in face-to-face classes, there are even further opportunities for a lot of in-depth discussion about these issues. But outside of graduate classes, there are also a number of possibilities for professional collaborations, and here, Mark Windschitl talks about the importance of professional collaboration in dealing with these very challenging issues. In-service teachers have taken up this practice of interacting with groups of kids for about three minutes on personal thinking, and when you multiply that, one example of that by a 100 teachers who are doing that, pretty soon you learn better and better ways to approach how that is done. You'll learn how for example, when you've got a 100 teachers doing this, you find out what are the ways to get that third student in the group who has pushed back from the table and doesn't want to participate? How do you gently invite them into the conversation? When you have a 100 teachers working on this, you can solve that problem, you can figure out, what kind of discourse move would you do? What kind of instructions would you give her norms? Would you emphasize before kids started that small group work. We can figure things out, not as individuals but as a collective of professionals who share some practices that are super important for being like responsive to kids ideas. The ambitious science teaching website provides a place for this kind of collaboration online, and let's take a look at this. So if you go down on that website, you'll see these following images and I'd like to read where it says become part of a community that shares a common vision of excellence in teaching, because ambitious science teaching focuses on doing four things really well in the classroom, the core practices which are shown on the left. Members of a community can speak a common language about how to continually improve instruction and support student learning. We can frame problems together and work toward solutions with help from each other. The expertise of our community comes from our members, teachers, instructional coaches, teacher educators, as well as from extensive empirical classroom research. On this site, you can explore how other professionals are using core practices and the tools that go with them. You will be able to interact with other ambitious educators and contribute to the communities problem-solving efforts. Visit our community page and our teacher page for more. So this I think is a powerful way of interacting with other teachers who are asking similar questions. How can I do these kinds of difficult practices in my classroom that can help students to express critique and modify their ideas? If you look at the core practices, they're not really that's specific to science, even though science is used in a couple of places. So for example, planning for engagement with important science ideas, one could substitute mathematical ideas, eliciting students ideas, supporting ongoing changes and thinking, pressing for evidence-based explanations or in the case of of mathematics proof or mathematical justifications. So I think a lot of the discussions on this site would be very valuable for mathematics teachers as well as science teachers. There are also a number of online discussion possibilities through the announced National Council of Teachers of Mathematics or NCTM discussions that focus on the teaching of specific topics or issues related to implementing constructivist learning environments et cetera. It's also possible to form your own discussion group, inviting other teachers in your school, other teachers in your district or even nationally to discuss issues that are of importance in creating constructivist learning environments. Another chance for professional collaborations is professional development. Now, professional development I think often gets a bad rap because it's often done ineffectively and here, Linda Darling-Hammond talks about some of the kinds of ineffective professional development, that ineffective professional development often relies on the one-shot workshop model, focuses only on training teachers on new techniques and behaviors. So again, sort of a focus on doing correct techniques as opposed to understanding why those techniques are important, is not related to teacher specific contexts and curricula, is episodic and fragmented, expects teachers to make changes in isolation and without support, does not provide sustained teacher learning opportunities over multiple days and weeks. So I think, unfortunately, a lot of the professional development particularly in the United States follows this kind of model, it's sort of episodic, one-shot, limited, not extended, not really allowing for a lot of the kinds of professional collaboration that we've talked about. Effective professional development according to Linda Darling-Hammond deepens teachers knowledge of content and how to teach students, helps teachers understand how students learn specific content, provides opportunities for active hands-on learning, enables teachers to acquire new knowledge, apply it, to practice and reflect on the results with colleagues, and I think this is particularly important that the reflection on the results with colleagues. It's part of a school reform effort that links curriculum assessment and standards to professional learning, is collaborative and collegial and is intensive and sustained over time, and so this is a very different than the kind of one-shot or episodic professional development that is often the norm particularly in American classrooms. So I'd like to talk about one example of this kind of effective professional development that could be thought of as an example of a way of structuring a professional learning community, and that example is lesson study. Lesson study is a dominant form of professional development in Japan that has been found to be very beneficial for helping teachers to make sense of innovations in practice and it's gaining increasing traction in the United States. So I'd like to talk about what lesson study is, and then look at a single example of lesson study where it has been very effective. So lesson study involves three aspects, the first aspect is the planning of a research lesson, and this involves sort of larger scale planning identifying long-term goals for students choosing the subject in unit to investigate studying standards research and curricula. Then more specific, planning of a research lesson, articulating the lesson goals, and then tying the task and articulating student thinking and identifying data to be collected during the research lesson. Then the research lesson itself, one team member teaches the lesson, and other team members observe and record student thinking and learning during the research lesson. Then the third aspect, is reflecting on that research lesson. Meeting after the lesson to discuss data on students thinking and learning, often having an outside expert who would come to the research lesson and then meet with the teachers to kind of reflect on the research lesson, and then reflecting on what they learned during the cycle as a whole. And so this has been shown to be very powerful in terms of providing a structure for teachers to interact about very important issues of teaching and learning. So let's look at one example of lesson study, and this took place at Highlands Elementary School. Initially when this was introduced by the Principal, there were only a handful of teachers who are interested in doing this, and so they went through a cycle of lesson study taught couple of research lessons, and then they presented what they had done to the rest of the faculty, and voluntarily most of the faculty joined the following year and the year after that every member of the faculty was an enthusiastic participant in the lesson study structure. Talking about the evolution of how this evolved at Highlands Elementary School, first they decided that it was about teacher learning and not just about lessons. When they were initially going through the lesson study cycle, they would think about it as polishing the lesson or polishing the stone I think they called it. That the goal of this was to come up with a perfect lesson. And after around or two of this they realized that the real power of lesson study was not in coming up with perfect lessons, but rather as using often imperfect lessons to provide a very concrete context for thinking about these complex issues of practice. Effective lesson study hinges on skillful observation in subsequent discussion. They found that, when they initially tried lesson study, they tended to just say "okay well let's just have teachers observe and then we'll talk about it" and what they found was that oftentimes the discussion was rather shallow and in the form of, while the students were engaged or they weren't engaged or they were on task or not or that kind of thing. But when they would ask observers to pay specific attention to particular aspects of student thinking, they found that, the reflective discussions were much deeper and much more valuable. They also found that lesson study is enhanced by turning to outside sources. So for example, bringing in particular research studies that were particularly relevant to the research lesson that they were teaching, and discussing that as a group, bringing in outside experts. For example, mathematics educators to observe the research lesson and then to meet during the reflective session. They found that this was very valuable and turned out to be a very powerful way of investigating these research ideas that just by reading a paper, might seem a little bit ivory tower but in talking about it in the context of a research lesson, they could really begin to extract the juices from these outside resources in particularly inviting outside experts to share their ideas. This further enhanced their ability to connect important research ideas with practice.And finally, the phases of lesson study needed to be balanced to integrated and as I've talked about before, they tended to spend a lot of time initially on coming up with the perfect lesson and what they came to realize is that they needed to obviously spend some time on constructing the lesson but that the real benefit was in conducting the research lesson with appropriate directions for paying attention to a student thinking and students ideas, and then spending a good amount of time reflecting back on the lesson and drawing in outside sources and really coming to understand what was going on in the lesson and what they can learn from the research lesson and not just think of it as coming up with a perfect lesson. So some of the outcomes of this lesson study. They found that in this school, lesson study became the primary mechanism for professional development, they found that it served as a way to meet requirements as opposed to another requirement in and of itself. So for example, they use it as a way for mentoring new teachers, they use this as a way to find ways to meet state mandates as opposed to just seeing it as another mandate. So it really served as a mechanism for meeting other requirements that otherwise might be more difficult. Finally they found that the students at Highlands who were there for 3 years while they were doing lesson study, they found that the students test scores increased three times that of students and other districts and they haven't hold a little bit and say that while we can't really say it was because of the lesson study but they did a lot of sort of weeding out other possibilities and so it seems pretty reasonable to think that because of lesson study, the teachers were developing in their abilities to really engage students ideas and help them to express critique and modify their ideas in ways that would help them to both understand the ideas better and to do better on the standardized tests. So I'd like to reflect back over the course, and think about some of the important ideas that we've encountered. In the first module, we talked about a constructivist perspective as shifting the focus to students ideas and idea based interactions in conceptually rich areas. In the second module, we found that students have many intuitive conceptual attractors around which ideas form, and that these will come into play even in areas not considered before such as the Monte Hall problem or the the spot on the paper problem that we looked at. Even though, students had never thought about these before they have strong expectations. Some of these conceptual attractors will impede understanding of STEM ideas and some can provide intuitive grounding for STEM ideas. It's important to help students express critique and modify their ideas in particular to find ways of drawing on their intuitive anchors ideas that can provide intuitive grounding for STEM ideas. And ways of moving past conceptual attractors that will impede understanding of STEM ideas. Finally such constructivist learning environments can be challenging to implement, but they're very good resources to help with this, such as research and other resources and professional collaborations. So I want to thank you for joining me in thinking about Constructivism, constructivist ideas, constructivist learning environments, issues in implementing constructivist learning environments Et cetera, and my hope is that through listening to the lectures, through discussions with your peers, through thinking about the readings, reflecting on the readings, reflecting on ideas through the assignments that you've come to some new perspectives on teaching and learning, that will be very powerful in helping students to express critique and modify their ideas in constructivist learning environments.
