March Instructional Vision Challenge! by Kristen Smidy

Productive Struggle

2025-03-10 14:46:56 UTC

I will use two strategies to show my students that I trust them to succeed. The first is consistently giving students enough time to build and revise their ideas. The other is to avoid carrying a pencil as a move around the room so I am not tempted to write on anyone's work. By not carrying a pencil, I am much more likely to ask questions rather than showing students how to solve something.

Protective struggle

jmason128 — 2025-03-11 14:30:02 UTC

In college prep, honors, and AP physics we are studying the change in momentum (impulse) of objects in collision. In the first lab, we are rolling a cart down a slope and crashing it into a barrier measuring the force of the collision. The baseline force results in an acceleration great enough to cause injury to a person. The students must design a bumper and crumple zone for the car to bring the acceleration down to something tolerable by a human. This involves repeated building and testing, failing and trying again. Each result is recorded whether or not the goal is reached and then analyzed for potential improvement.

The second lab on the topic is a reverse-egg-drop test. In an effort to not waste food, repetitive failure isn't the goal. The students will use what they learned in the first lab to build egg-protecting devices. Then they'll drop increasing masses from a fixed height onto their protected egg. We'll use a metric that includes the maximum mass withstood, the mass of the device, and the size of the device to quantify how well it worked.

Stepping Up

2025-03-19 20:14:29 UTC

My EEC student was able to push through a challenge while being supported by the elementary students' positive attitude. When asked to step outside of her comfort zone, our high student led a sentence building game on her own. She was in charge of modeling and giving the directions to the students while supervising their play. Not only did she own it but the second graders did very well with participation in the small group. Stepping away, I was able to see our HS student flourish knowing I was confident in her ability to lead the group.

Shifting the Lift

2025-03-22 11:43:39 UTC

One of the ways I work on productive struggle in the classroom is to make conscious efforts not to over scaffold. One way I do this is if I notice students are often asking me the same kinds of questions, I turn it around and say something like: “I bet you can answer that question! What are your thoughts?” Often, students already have some idea about what the answer is to their own question. By doing this, students take on more of the cognitive load, doing the thinking and the work, while I facilitate and ask guiding questions to help them deepen and extend their thinking.

Productive Struggle: Challenging Conversations/Class Discussions

2025-03-25 16:24:03 UTC

I've been working on shifting the lift and increasing wait time in my classes in order to facilitate deeper conversations/discussions. I find by allowing more wait time, students sit with their thoughts a moment longer and build more courage to speak up. If it's still silent, I will ask a probing question to help guide them, but I never simply give them the answer. I've been using some of the question/probing protocols (like "How Else & Why" or the "What makes you say that...?" protocols) to help push students' thinking & challenge them.

Productive Struggle in Class Discussion

2025-03-31 18:27:14 UTC

Students are practicing pushing through challenging tasks with a positive attitude in the form of collaborative discussions about common texts (this unit: poetry). Students are given roles and question stem cards that invite them to dig deeper into the text they're discussing. We've been using the analogy of "deep sea diving"-- in the beginning of a discussion we notice superficial elements of the text, and as we dive deeper into the poem, question the text and each other, we begin to notice, analyze, and explore more complex and nuanced elements of the text. The discussion question stem cards are based on the "What Makes You Say That?" and "How Else & Why?" protocols from Project Zero.