Hello TAU Team! I was intrigued by your use of visualizations to inform the work of this project. The last segment of your video was informative how this might happen. Is there evidence that movement pattern in the classroom is an important variable to measure, automate, and in this case, visualize?

Hello and thank you for sharing your work. Your project appears to combine research approaches that advise circulating and listening with those that advise getting involved through the use of the movement graph and the videos. You can see how teachers circulate and hear how they interact with students. I think the information would be very valuable for a teacher to get feedback on whether they are equitable in their circulation and the quality of their interaction with students as they move around the room. This is in addition to highlighting and identifying dilemmas that may come up during group work. Can you describe the process of creating the movement graph including the technology that is involved?

I'm intrigued by the phrase "effective monitoring" in this context, particularly given your fascinating point that the research has contradictory recommendations. How will your teachers know what is effective? Is student learning being assessed in some way as part of the project? Thanks!

@sue part of the richness of our video coaching intervention is that teachers can listen to student talk before and after their interactions with the groups. this allows them to assess for themselves how their interactions supported students' math discourse or perhaps made it less rich. our pilots have been really great and eye-opening for the teachers

What a great presentation! I am looking forward to learning more about the findings once they become available. In the meantime, I am curious to know your thoughts on to what degree the different math tasks that students are working on might influence teachers’ decisions on providing the kinds of guidance/feedback on students’ collaboration work. Thank you!

I do have one more question, about learning outcomes. I realize this is a very new project, but could you share what your plans are for assessment of what the teachers are learning? Thanks.

Are you gathering data from the students to see how their perceptions of their teacher and own learning changes as the teacher integrates what they learn from their movements?

I would be curious if as the teacher more evenly distributes their time across groups if the struggling students/groups feel they are not getting enough help and if those that are doing well feel like the teacher check-ins in too much. I teach a project-based approach to introductory statistics, Passion-Driven Statistics, that is a flipped classroom. I am constantly moving around the room as students as for help and then checking on those that have not ask questions. I find that the students that are doing well quickly explain how it is going and are like I am good you can help someone else. Then the students that are struggling like me to sit down and walk through some of it with them. I feel like if I more evenly distributed my time I would distract and annoy the higher performers and my struggling students would not get caught up.

that is a really great question, kristin. we aren't interviewing students for two reasons. first, there is a team capacity issue. although we have several research assistants and a postdoc working on the data collection, we don't have the bandwidth to do justice to these questions. second, because the students are minors, they are a protected population. we have found that they are willing to be filmed while they are in class, but the IRB requirements to get them to assent to interviews (as well as their parents' consent) would be really challenging in this district. the district is understandably concerned about lost instructional time, so pulling them out of class would not work. additionally, transportation issues are complicated for a lot of our students, so asking them to come before or after school would be difficult as well. it would make for a great follow up study though!

Interesting discussion. I agree that the student discourse data is likely to be very revealing, even without additional non-embedded assessments like interviews or surveys. And presumably it includes comments from the students directly to the teacher of the kind Kristin is talking about, so that would be grist for the teacher discussion afterwards, and also the analysis.

My last thought is related to Ilana's last post... Given that you're doing analysis to try to make causal arguments between teacher interventions and QUALITY of student talk, it does seem as though you are being evaluative, just not sharing that with the teachers. Is that right? For me it brings up an interesting methodological question for these kinds of iterative reflective interventions: do you say nothing to the teachers and let them draw their own conclusions while you may come up with quite different conclusions after doing deep analyses? Or do you include your team's analysis as part of the intervention, providing some kind of rough cut of what you're seeing to inform the teachers' discussions? (I think Catherine Haden & Maureen Callanan call it 'blitz coding' so that it's quick enough to be formative feedback.) Just a thought... I look forward to hearing more about the project as it unfolds.

Sue, I so appreciate your engagement with our project! we are using these representations (the video and the IGS) to do co-inquiry with our teachers. part of what we deliberately avoid is evaluative talk. we talk about it a lot in chapter 6 of our book, "Learning to Inquire into Teaching". feel free to reach out offline too :)

This is an interesting study. Have you thought of expanding this to higher education. I know that many community colleges are using active learning techniques in their classes to help their students understand the material. Also, my project, StatPREP, has active learning activities for teachers to use in their classes.