The good news is YES. We definitely can.

Video clips of lessons, capturing teacher reflections where they discuss the decisions not the actions, virtual coaching, virtual professional learning communities. We have great access now. The work I think is on our conversations. Critical conversations where we name and articulate core ideas that drive our strategies and resources. Peer reviews where we challenge each other’s practice and provide feedback that goes beyond the superficial “this is what I do.” Comparing the enactments of common lessons?

I’m excited by the potential of where tech can take us, but the work will be around us learning how to learn through the new medium.

This from Kelly is rattling around pretty hard:

But this work is much harder, much more personal, much more in the moment of the classroom. Can we harness the power of tech to share this work as well as we have to share the tools?

As discussed at length here, part of the issue is that we often take up lessons without reflecting on the purpose/intent of the tool. Worse, we enact lessons without a deep understanding of the mathematics at play, which cripples our ability to provide feedback in class that centers on the core ideas. We may ask a great first questions, but the second and third, arising from student thinking, fall short. Looking for resources on a unit or larger scale may help make sense of the progression, but I’m not sure it helps us uncover the deeper structures at play.

The underlying and unsaid trait of humanity here is that we take any resource and bend them to our own practice. I’ve seen a 3 ACT over scaffolded, a card sort turned worksheet, a “sometimes, always, never” busted up with the hammer of over-simplification. I’ve also seen many a well intending teacher get into a great lesson, only to find they lack the classroom strategies (usually around feedback questions and discussion) that empower them to reveal and give space to the student thinking.

So –
Learning takes place in layers. A lesson lives within a classroom experience. To be effective depends on my mindset, my methods, and the tools I have in the moment.

Great lessons in the context of learning around mindset and methods are the instruments we use to “do” our work. But the reflection and coaching conversations where we “learn” about our work are critical as well. Without them, we use scalpels like hammers.

But this work is much harder, much more personal, much more in the moment of the classroom. Can we harness the power of tech to share this work as well as we have to share the tools?

Early on I would edit resources and end up reducing cognitive demand in the interest of making things clearer for students. Now I edit resources to remove material and increase cognitive demand. Or even more often, I’m taking bits and pieces because I have a learning goal, learning process goal and study skills goal that I have to meet with one lesson.

There is also the problem that I would rather edit materials and build lessons than grade and see how I never get every single student to learn everything I hoped for.

Really, we need to literally go back to questions such as ‘Why am I teaching this?’ ‘Where does this fit into the students learning journey?’ and ‘How am I going to structure the learning so that the student wants to learn this?’ before we even think about where resources fit into our lesson. This takes a lot of time to think about and process. Time and space many teachers just don’t have.

Answer-getting might be a goal for students, a good and humble goal if they are invited to struggle and allowed to explore in the spirit of seeking understanding.

Resource-finding may just be the beginning for teachers. No resource, no matter how good, teaches itself. That very good resource may lead a teacher to create an entire new lesson with little resemblance to the original, but the resource was there, nonetheless, to inspire her.

Answer-getting means nothing without deep understanding. Resource-getting means nothing without thoughtful implementation. Ah, but high test scores, shiny technology, and well packaged resources are hard to resist.

My biggest change in opinion is about scope: you can string a ton of great lessons into a horrible tapestry, especially if those lessons were constructed independently. What comes right before this, what comes next, what came three months ago, what came last year, what comes three months from now, what comes a year from now? If the focus is on higher-order mathematical thinking, these questions have huge impact on a lesson’s effectiveness.

These questions also make it almost impossible to judge an effective-looking lesson in a vacuum, or to recommend a specific lesson on a topic above another. It’s hard for me to recommend a specific lesson from Illustrative, or a three-act, because the whole is rarely being taken into account. For example, one could probably take lessons from Illustrative, and build a curriculum using those precise lessons. In my opinion, this curriculum would be great on the microscopic level and horrible as a cohesive whole. Every single one of those lessons could be effective, but they’re not telling a consistent story.

I also see this with the ways schools use textbooks, and this is really the textbooks’ fault. “We’re going to start with Chapter 9, then do Chapters 3 and 4, then 12, then back to 5-8.” What the hell is that, nobody would read a novel that way, but we do it all the time when designing math courses. This is possible only if a textbook is agnostic to the order of its units, and the consequences are disjoint pieces that cannot build on one another by design. The textbook won’t expect students to remember what they did a month earlier, because it’s impossible to know! The teacher must then add this cohesiveness to the curriculum on their own, and that is truly difficult to accomplish.

In my opinion, teachers do far too much editing or adapting of materials. It takes a huge amount of time to do so effectively, and that is time that could be spent in many other positive ways. Unfortunately this seems to happen by necessity at times, due to nonexistent or poor materials. I don’t feel teachers should be required or expected to write their own curriculum.

It’s hard to say how or if this problem can be solved, but one thought is to look for chapters and units as resources rather than looking for lessons. The same cohesion problems can occur, but at least the entire unit will be internally consistent.

(1) it’s easier/quicker to grab a resource and plug-and-play than it is to think critically about why it’s effective (and provides an easy scapegoat if a class period doesn’t go well), and teachers are often tired/pressed for time– this may be unique to the context I work in, because I imagine overwhelmed novices may succumb to this type of pressure more often than veterans

(2) sometimes, teaching is presented as a set of best practices– you do this checklist of things and you are therefore a good teacher– rather than as an infinitely complex set of choices that are constantly being made. when good teaching is about doing xyz, then the reason that xyz works (or works in some cases but not others) doesn’t matter as much as how to do more of xyz or how to do xyz better. if good teaching were about constantly making choices, however, then it becomes more important to understand the principles or consequences or factors you’d want to consider to make good choices.