How to support productive struggle?
Recognizing the Importance of effort as students work to make sense of new ideas
- Teacher explicitly encourages students to persevere.
- Teacher asks students to explain and justify how they solved a task. Teacher values the quality of the explanation as much as the final solution.
allowing students to struggle with guidance without showing and telling procedure or ANSWER
- Teacher finds ways to support students without removing all of the challenges.
- Teacher initiates a classroom discussion where students provide suggestions on next steps in solving a problem.
providing time for students to explore deeply the mathematical ideas
Teacher provides wait time.
- “Can you put your hands down and give everyone a minute to think?”
- “Take your time to think…”
- “Think in your head silently about this…”
- “Let’s take some time to think…”
asking questions with the PURPOSE of advanced student thinking
- Teacher asks students to write down what they know about a problem and what they wish they knew because it would help them solve the problem.
- Teacher asks students questions that scaffold students’ thinking without stepping in to do the work for them.
asking question to help students better understand the task
- “I don’t know what to do next.”
- Students ask questions related to the source.
- Students help one another without telling their classmates what the answer is or how to solve the problem.
providing an environment where students respect and support each other with ideas
- Talk between teacher and students and among students is uniformly respectful, with little to no intervention needed by the teacher to correct disrespectful talk among students.
- Students discuss and analyze incomplete and/or wrong answers respectfully and productively.