In a responsive teaching classroom, where a major goal is for students take responsibility for sharing and debating ideas, the teacher and students need to work together to achieve that goal. There are many pedagogical and management strategies that teachers can use to help students think about their ideas, to manage the class discussion of ideas, to encourage all students to be involved in the discussion, and to keep the focus on the students’ ideas, not on the teachers.
Below we provide a few strategies that one of our teachers, Sharon Fargason, has found helpful in dealing with some class management issues. Sharon discusses these strategies in the context of specific classroom examples, which are video clip episodes from her implementations of the Toy Cars module. Following each of her comments below we provide the appropriate video clip from the Responsive Curricula section of this website.
Sharon wrote about her rationale for this strategy in two different sets of teacher moves comments.
I often give the students writing assignments. This is a move that is helpful for students, as it gives them time and space to process all the ideas out there. However, this move is also strategic on my part. This writing time gives me time to reflect, also. It gives me time to think about where we should go next, and how I can refocus the group after a flurry of activities or ideas. (Sharon, Year 2, Part 1, Day 4, Video Clip 2)
Video Clip 2 (Day 4)
The students’ notebooks are wonderful tools for me throughout the year. Since it is difficult for me to hear and remember all the ideas I hear while I am talking with the students, I often depend on their notebooks to provide me with formative assessments that will help me determine my next steps. Notebooks also help me get a window into the brains of students who have trouble communicating verbally. … (Sharon, Year 2, Part 2, Day 1, Video Clip 4)
Video Clip 4 (Day 1)
I try to write down the words students say often. This helps me remember things that might be worth discussing more, and it is also important validation for the students. Often, things are not written on the board unless they are “correct” or important vocabulary words. I feel that by writing down student ideas, the students feel that their ideas are important and their contributions are helpful for the community.
This clip also illustrates a struggle I usually have when teaching responsively: how to manage conversations effectively. I usually do not require students to raise their hands to speak because I find that it often makes the flow of conversations a bit awkward. It also gives me all the power and makes me the clear leader of the group. Instead, I aim to teach the students how to navigate through a conversation like adults do—by pausing to let others speak when you can tell they want to. However, this is always a challenge for me, and sometimes means that there are several people who are not being heard or who are not engaged. For me, responsive teaching is a constant dance of placing myself in the background and foreground as I assess the needs of the class. (Sharon, Year 2, Part 1, Day 6, Video Clip 1)
Video Clip 1 (Day 6)
One way to provide students practice in scientific argumentation is to engage them in debates. Opportunities for debates occur when there is a difference in opinion among students in the class about a particular idea or event. For example, during Sharon’s toy cars implementation, students were talking about a car moving down a ramp, and there was a disagreement as to whether the car could go down the ramp itself or whether it needed to be pushed. To ensure as many students as possible would be involved in this discussion, Sharon had students vote on what they thought.
In this clip, I asked students to raise their hands and pick a side on an issue that was under debate: whether or not the car needed to be pushed. This is a strategy I use to involve the whole class when the discussion has become between a few people. Here, I was able to bring Jennifer into the conversation by asking her why she chose the side she did. Since Jennifer was usually pretty verbal in whole group settings, I felt confident that I could call on her without warning. There is also a class norm set that if you don’t want to share, you can always pass. I have to be careful of who I put on the spot. For many students, this would be a very stressful situation. (Sharon, Year 2, Part 1, Day 7, Video Clip 1)
Video Clip 1 (Day 7)
After students are engaged in whole class discussions, a common next move for a teacher is to have the students break up into small groups to discuss their ideas further or to write their ideas in science notebooks. Several of the video clips in Sharon’s Toy Car implementations show her sitting down at the tables and having lengthy and substantive discussions with students. This was her way of modeling careful listening and asking appropriate questions, but it did raise some classroom management concerns.
My ultimate goal during science time is to hear student ideas and be able to respond to them in a way that moves them toward thinking scientifically. However, I always need to attend to classroom management as well. Since this was our first week of school, management was something heavily on my mind, and the students were still learning about my expectations. I wanted the students to know that I very much wanted to hear the substance of their ideas, so I chose to sit down and focus on one student even though the rest of the class was having trouble focusing on the task at hand. Although very aware of behaviors around me that were not so desirable, I tried to give Teresa my full attention. This allowed me to hear Teresa and begin to set our classroom norms. I wanted the students to know that my attention would be directed toward students and their ideas. Even if the rest of the students were off task, as long as they were safe, I chose to ignore them. While it is certainly not wise to allow students to engage in off task behaviors all the time, some carefully chosen moments of focus on students doing the right thing can help students understand what is valued in the class. (Sharon, Year 2, Part 1, Day 1, Video Clip 4)
Video Clip 4 (Day 1)
One quandary that often comes up in a responsive teaching classroom is when the teacher senses the students are ‘off track’ in trying to do an experiment or figuring out something. There is a strong tendency to intervene and be helpful, but this needs to be weighed against the value of having students learn from their mistakes. One example from Sharon’s class is when students were discussing the results of an experiment they had done where they let cars slide down ramps with different ‘stuff’ (jelly, oil, etc.) covering the surface of the slides. Sharon expresses her concerns about the value of what the students were doing.
The activities in this section were difficult for me, as a teacher, because I was unsure of the scientific value they would contribute. I was actually interested in thinking about how the type of material on your shoe affected the way it went down a ramp; however, I felt that it was necessary to let the students pursue what they were actually interested in. I also knew that their experiment designs were not perfect, and I had the urge to suggest better or easier ways to set them up. However, I fought my urge to correct, and gave them free reign because I felt that this was part of the scientific learning process. I hoped that the mistakes they made and successes they had would help them improve their designs next time. (Sharon, Year 2, Part 1, Day 15, Video Clip 3)
Video Clip 3 (Day 15)