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Pacing Discourse-Rich Lessons with Dr. Mike Steele · Rounding Up

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As a classroom teacher, pacing lessons was often my Achilles heel.
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If my students were sharing their thinking or working on a task,
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I sometimes struggled to decide when to move on to the next phase of a lesson.
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Today we're talking with Mike Steele from Ball State University about several
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high leverage practices that educators can use to plan and pace their
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lessons. Well,
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hi Mike. Welcome to the podcast.
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I'm excited to talk with you about discourse rich lessons and what it looks like
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to pace them.
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Well, I'm excited to talk with you too about this. Mike,
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this has been a real focus and interest and I'm so excited that this article
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grabbed your attention.
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I suppose the first question I should ask for the audience is,
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what do you mean when you're talking about a discourse rich lesson?
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What does that term mean about the lesson and perhaps also about the role of the
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teacher?
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Yeah, I think it's a great question to start with.
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So when we're talking about a discourse rich lesson,
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we're talking about one that has some mathematics that's worth talking about
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in it. So opportunities for thinking, reasoning,
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problem solving in progress thinking that leads to new mathematical
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understandings and that kind of implicit in that discourse rich lesson is
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student discourse rich lesson that we want not just
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teachers talking about sharing their own thinking about the mathematics,
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but opportunities for students to share their own thinking,
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to shape that thinking, to talk with each other,
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to see each other as intellectual resources in
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mathematics. And so to have a lesson like that,
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you've got to have a number of things in place.
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You've got to have a mathematical task that's worth talking about, right?
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So something that's not just a calculation and we end up at an answer and that
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the discourse isn't just let me relay to you as a student the steps I took to do
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this.
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Because a lot of times when students are just starting to experience discourse
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rich lessons,
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that's kind of mode one that they engage in is let me recite for you the things
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that I did,
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but really opportunities to go beyond that and get into the reasoning and the
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why of the mathematics,
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and hopefully to explore some approaches or perspectives or representations
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that they may not have defaulted to in their first
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run through or their first experience digging into a mathematical task.
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So the task has to have those opportunities and then we have to create learning
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environments that really foster those opportunities and students as
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the creators of mathematics and the teacher as the person who's shaping and
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guiding that discussion in a mathematically productive way.
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One of the things that struck me is there is likely a problem of practice that
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you're trying to solve in publishing this article,
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and I wonder if we could pull the curtain back and have you talk a bit about
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what was the genesis of this article for you?
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Absolutely.
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So let me take us back about 20 or 25 years and I'll take you back to some
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early work that went on around these sorts of rich tasks and discourse rich
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lessons.
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So a lot of this legacy comes out of research or a project in the late nineties
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called the Quasar Project that helped identify what is a rich task,
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what is a task as the researchers described it,
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of high cognitive demand that has those opportunities for thinking and
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reasoning. The next question that that line of research brought forward is,
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okay, so we know what a task looks like that gives these opportunities.
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How does this change what teachers do in the classroom?
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How they plan for lessons,
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how they make those moment to moment decisions as they're engaged in the
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teaching of that lesson?
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Because it's very different than actually when I started teaching middle school
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in the nineties where my preparation was,
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I looked at the content I had for that day, I wrote three example problems,
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I wanted to write on the board that I very carefully got all the steps and put
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those up and explain them and answered some questions. Alright,
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everybody understand that? Okay, great moving on.
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And then the students went and produced that.
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That's fine for some procedural things,
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but if I really wanted them to engage in thinking and reasoning,
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I had to start changing my whole practice.
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So this bubbles up out of the original work of the five practices for
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orchestrating productive discussions from Peg Smith and Mary Kay Stein,
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I had the opportunity actually to work with them both in the early two thousands
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at the University of Pittsburgh.
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And so as we were working on this five practices framework that was supposed to
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help teachers think about what does a different conceptualization of
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planning and teaching look like that really gets us to
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this discourse rich classroom environment where students are making sense of and
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grappling with mathematics and talking to each other in a meaningful way about
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it.
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We worked with teachers around that and the five practices is certainly helpful,
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but then as teachers were working with the five practice,
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they were anticipating student thinking,
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they were writing questions that assess and advance student thinking.
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Some of the things that came up were, okay,
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what are the moment to moment decisions and challenges related to
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that as we start planning and teaching in this way?
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And a number of common challenges came up.
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A lot of times when we're using a five practice lesson,
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we're doing kind of a launch, explore,
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share and discuss sort of format where we've got the teacher who's getting us
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started on a task, but we're not giving the farm away on that task.
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We're not saying too much and guiding their thinking.
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And then we let students have some time individually and in small groups to
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start messing around with the mathematics, working, talking,
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and then at some point we're going to call everybody together and we're going to
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share what the different ways of thinking were.
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We're going to try to draw that together.
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Peg Smith likes to talk about this as being more than a show and tell, right?
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So it's not just we stand up, we gave our answer,
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we did that great next group doing the same thing,
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and oftentimes they start to look alike,
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but there's some really meaningful thinking that goes on in that whole class
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discussion.
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So one of the really pragmatic concerns here is how do I know when to move?
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So I've got students working individually and maybe I gave them three minutes to
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get started. Was that enough? What can I see in the work they're doing?
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What questions am I going to hear to tell me? Okay,
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now it's a good moment to move to small group. And then similarly,
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when you've got small groups working, they're cranking away on a task.
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There might be multiple sub-questions in that task.
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What's my cue that we're ready to go on to that whole class
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discussion?
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We were in so many classrooms where teachers were really working hard to do this
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work, and this happens to me all the time.
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I have somehow miscalculated what students are going to be able to do,
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either how quickly they're going to be able to do it,
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or I expected them to draw on this piece of prior knowledge and it took us a
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while to get there,
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or they flown through something that I expect them to fly through.
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So I'm having to make some choice in a moment saying,
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this isn't exactly how I imagined it, so what do I do here?
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And frequently with teachers that get caught in that dilemma,
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the first response is to take control back. Say, okay,
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you all struggl going with this.
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Let's come back together and let me show you what you should have figured out
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here. And it's done with the best of intentions.
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We need to get some closure on the mathematical ideas.
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But then it takes us right away from what we were trying to do,
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which was have our students grapple with the mathematics.
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And so we do this lovely polished job of putting that together and maybe
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students took the important things away from that, that they wanted to,
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maybe they didn't, but they didn't get all the way they were on their own.
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So that's really the problem of practice that this helps us to solve is when we
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get in those positions of, okay, I got to make a call.
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I've got this much time left,
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I've got this sort of work that I see going on in the classroom, am I ready?
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What can I do next?
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That really keeps that ownership of the mathematics with our
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students, but still gives me some ability to orchestrate,
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to shape that discussion in a way that's mathematically meaningful and that gets
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at the goals I had for the lesson.
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Yeah,
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I appreciated that part of the article and even just hearing you describe that
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so much, Mike,
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because you gave words to I think what sat behind the dilemma that I found
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myself in so often,
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which was I was either trying to gauge whether there was enough,
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and I think the challenges we're going to get into what enough actually might
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mean,
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but given enough time whether I was confident that there was understanding
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how much understanding was necessary and what that translates into
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is a lack of clarity around how do I use my time?
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How do I gauge when it's worth expending some of the time
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that I maybe hadn't thought about and when it's worth recognizing that perhaps I
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didn't need all of that and I'm ready to do something.
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So I think the next question probably should be, let's talk about enough.
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When you talk about knowing if you have enough,
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say a little bit more about what you mean and perhaps what a teacher might be
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looking and listening for.
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Absolutely.
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And I think this is a hidden thread in that five practices model because we
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say, okay,
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we want that whole class discussion to still be a site for learning where
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there are some new ideas that are coming together.
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So that then backs me up to thinking about the small group work.
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I'm putting myself in that mode where I've got six groups working around the
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classroom, I'm circulating around, I'm asking questions.
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I of course don't see every single thing at any given moment that the small
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groups are doing. So I'm getting these little excerpts, right,
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these little two to three minute excerpts when you stop into a group.
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So I think when we think about enough,
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I want to think about with that task that I'm doing with what my mathematical
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goals are and knowing that we're going to have time on the backend of this whole
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class discussion to pull some ideas together,
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to sharpen some things to clarify some of the mathematics.
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Do I have enough mathematical grist for the mill here
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in what the small groups are doing to be able to then take that
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and make progress with students thinking at the center again,
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not taking over the thinking myself to be able to do that work.
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So for any given mathematical idea as I've started thinking about
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this, when I plan lessons using the five practices model,
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I am really taking that apart.
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What's the mathematical nugget that I'm listening for here,
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that I'm looking for in students' work that tells me, okay,
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we've gotten to a point where if I were to call people together right now
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and get them thinking about it, that there's more to think about,
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but we're well on our way. And also when I'm looking for that,
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knowing that I'm also not looking at those six groups all at exactly the same
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time. So I want to look for those mile markers along the way that tells me we're
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getting close, but we're not all the way there because if I pick one that's,
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we're pretty much all the way there.
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That first group I come to and I'm going to circulate around to five more.
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They're going to have run out of interesting things to do and they're off
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talking about thinking about something else.
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So that really becomes the fine line.
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What are those little mathematical ideas along the way that are far enough that
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get us towards our goals,
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but still we've got a little bit of the journey to go that we're going to go on
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together.
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This is so fascinating.
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The analogy that's coming together in my mind is almost like you're listening
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for the ingredients for a conversation that you want to have
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as a group.
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So it's not necessarily has everyone finished and that's
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your threshold. It's actually,
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did I hear this idea starting to bubble up?
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Did I hear elements of this idea or this strategy start to bubble up?
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Is there an insight that's percolating in different groups and
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it's the combination of those things that the teacher is listening for,
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and that's kind of the gauge of enoughness. Is that an accurate analogy?
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It is,
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and I love that analogy because it reminds me of a favorite in our household as
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we're relaxing. We love to watch the Great British Baking Show.
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So you're watching people take something from ingredients to a finished
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product. Now as you're watching that 20 minute segment,
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they're working on their technical challenge and they're all baking the same
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thing.
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I don't have to wait until the end of that where they've presented their
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finished product to have a good idea of what's going to happen as I'm going
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through, as I'm watching 'em through that baking process, we're at the middle,
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my wife and I are talking like, Ooh, I got concerns about that one.
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That one's looking good though. We get an idea of where it's going.
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So I think the ingredient analogy really lands with me. We don't have to wait.
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We're looking for those pieces to be able to pull that together,
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those ingredients. We're not waiting until there's a final product and saying,
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because then what is there a say about it? Oh, look, that looks great. Oh,
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that one. Maybe not exactly what we'd intended.
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So it's giving us those ingredients for that whole class discussion.
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The other thing that struck me as I was listening to you is we're not teaching a
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task. We're teaching a set of ideas or relationships.
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The task is the vehicle, so it's perfectly reasonable.
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It seems to say we're going to pause at this point in the task or at a
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place where students might not be entirely finished with the task.
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And we might have a conversation at that point because we have enough that we
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can have part of the conversation.
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And that doesn't mean that they don't go back to the task.
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But you're really helping me recognize that one of the places where I sometimes
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get stuck or got stuck when I was teaching is task completion
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was part of my time marking.
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And I think really what you're challenging me and other educators to do is to
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say the task is just the vehicle. What's going on?
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What's percolating around that task as it's happening?
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How does that strike you?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And it was the same challenge with me and sometimes still is the same challenge
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with me. Yeah,
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you give this task and we think about that task as our unit of analysis as a
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teacher when we're planning.
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And so we want our students as we're using it to get to the end of it.
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It's a very natural thing to do. And let me make this really concrete.
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If I'm doing a visual pattern task with third graders, we have,
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I think there's one of the elementary five practices book called tables and
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chairs.
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So you've got these square tables that have four seats around them and you're
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putting a string of tables together and asking kids to get at the
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generalization. If you have any number of tables, how many people can you seat?
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And so I think early when I started giving those tasks, I was looking for, okay,
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has everybody gotten to the rule? Have they gotten to that generalization?
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Okay,
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now we can talk about it and we can talk about the different ways people made
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sense of that geometrically and those connections.
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And that's what I want to get out of the whole class discussion.
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But we don't even have to get there if groups have a sense of how that pattern
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is growing, even if they haven't gotten to the formal description of the rule.
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Because if they've gotten to that point, they've made some sense of the visual,
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they've made some of those connections, they've parsed that in different ways.
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That's plenty for me to have a good conversation that we can come to that rule
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as a group and we can even come to it in different ways as a group.
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But it frees me up from being like, okay, everybody got the rule,
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everybody got the rule, everybody got the rule. Because that often resulted in,
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I'd have a couple of groups that maybe had been a little slower getting started
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and they're still getting there.
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And then I'm sitting there and I'm talking to them,
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I'm giving them these terribly leading questions. Can we just get to the rule?
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Come on, let's go. You're almost there. We got it. We got it.
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And that then is again,
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me taking over that thinking and not giving them the space for those ideas to
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breathe.
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What else is jumping out for me is the ramifications for how thinking this way
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actually might shift the way that I would plan for teaching,
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but also how it might shift the way that I'm looking for evidence to
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assess students' progress during the task.
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So I wonder if you have situations or maybe some
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recommendations for how might a person plan in ways that
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help them recognize the ways that the task can be a vehicle,
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but also plan for the kind of evidence that they might be looking for along the
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way. Could you talk a little bit about that?
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Absolutely. So I'll give kind of a multi-layered description of this.
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When we're using a task that's got multiple solution paths that has these
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opportunities for diverse thinking,
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the five practices framework tells us like anticipating student thinking is a
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critical part of it.
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So what are the different solution paths that students can take through it?
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So if it's a visual pattern task, they may look at it this way with a visual,
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they may think about those tables like the tops and the bottoms and then the
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sides.
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They may think about the two ends of the tables having different numbers of
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chairs and the ones in between having different number of chairs and parsing it
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that way. And we can develop those. It's actually for me,
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quite a lot of fun to develop those fully formed solutions that students can do.
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And early on when I was enacting lessons like this, I would do that.
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I'd have those that I was looking for.
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I'd also think about questions I'd want to ask students who are struggling to
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get started or maybe were going down a path that may not be
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mathematically productive and the questions I might ask them to get them on a
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more mathematically productive path.
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And I'd go around and I'd look for those solutions and I'd use that to think
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about my selecting, my sequencing, my connecting my whole class discussion.
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So great check. That's layer one.
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I think responding to the challenge of what's enough requires
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us to then take those solution paths apart,
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both the fully formed ones, maybe the incomplete thinking and say,
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okay, within that solution,
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what are the things that I want to see and hear that gives me some confidence
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that we're on this path, even if we're not at the end of this path.
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And that give me enough to think about. So if I think about,
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I'll go back again to this visual pattern task analogy.
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If I see groups that are talking about increases,
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so when we add a table,
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we're adding two chairs or they're making that
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distinction between those end tables and the center tables.
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And I've asked them a couple of questions like, okay,
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they've done that for four, they've done that for five.
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We may not have done that for 10 or a hundred or a generalization,
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but that might be enough.
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So I'm trying to take apart the mathematics and look for those little ideas
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within it. We've got this idea of a constant rate of change.
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We've got an idea that the number of tables and the number of chairs have a
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direct relationship here.
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So we're setting the stage for that functional thinking.
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Even if at a third grade level we're not going to talk about that word.
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And those might be the important goals that I have for the lesson.
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So that's the next phase of what I'm doing.
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In addition to those fully formed solutions,
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I'm figuring out what are the little mathematical ideas in each that I would
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want to see or hear in my classroom that tell me, okay,
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I have a good sense of where this are.
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I know where this bakes going to turn out five minutes from now on the show when
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they've taken it out of the oven.
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So that's I think the next layer of that planning of trying to figure out how to
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plan. And then as we're in the moment in the classroom,
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being able to know what we're looking for and listening for,
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and the listening for me is really, really important.
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I think when I started doing this and I had a sense of what are the mathematical
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ideas I need to draw on,
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I made the mistake of overly looking for those on paper.
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And if we think about how students make sense of writing things down,
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and sometimes despite our best efforts, the finality that comes with it,
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if I've written it down, I have made it real.
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And if our thinking is still kind of this in progress thinking,
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we may not be ready to write it down.
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So if I wait for it to be written on the page,
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I may have waited too long or longer than I needed to for everybody to get that
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idea. So I'm going to want to make sure I listen for key words and phrases,
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and I might have a couple of questions teed up to help me hear those.
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And once I've heard those, I'm like, okay, I am ready to go. And then for me,
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at least in my early fifties and not having the memory that I did when I was a
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22-year-old fresh out of the box classroom teacher,
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I need to have a way of keeping track of that and writing that down.
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So be it physical, be it digital, I want to say, okay,
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I know what I'm listening for, what I'm looking for.
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And sometimes those may be interchangeable. If it's written on the page, great.
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If not, if I hear it, that's great too.
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And then if I've got a pretty good roster of that as I've moved through and say,
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okay, I feel like all of my groups or most of my groups are at this point,
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there we go. I feel confident that when I pull us back together,
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it's not going to be me asking a question.
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And then that terribly awkward sea of crickets out there, I'm like,
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I know you were thinking about stuff, just give it to me.
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I know you've got this,
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but it gives me much more confidence that we're going to have that nice
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transition into a good whole class discussion.
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Okay. There's a ton of powerful stuff that you just said.
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So I want to try to mark two things that really jump out for me.
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One is an observation that I think is important,
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and then one is a thought that I want to pick your brain around a little bit
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further. I think the biggest piece that I heard you say,
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which as you were talking about,
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is this notion that I'm waiting for something to appear in written form and it
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feels really freeing and it gives me a lot more space to say,
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this is something I could hear or I could even see in the way that kids were
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manipulating materials that counts as evidence,
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and I don't have to literally see it written on a paper in order for me
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to count that that idea is in the room.
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I just want to name that for the audience because that feels tremendously
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important because from a practical standpoint,
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if we're waiting for it to be written, that takes more time.
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And it doesn't necessarily mean that suddenly it appeared and before when it was
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just in a child's mind or in the way that they were manipulating something,
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that it wasn't there. It was there. So I just want to mark that.
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The other thing that you had me thinking about is I know for myself,
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I've gone through and done some of the anticipation work in the five practices,
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but what struck me is when my colleagues and I would do that,
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we often would generate quite a few alternative strategies or
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ideas.
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But I feel like what we were looking at is the final outcome like this
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counting by one strategy is what we might see.
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This decomposing numbers more flexibly is something we might
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see. This counting on strategy is something we might see.
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But what we didn't talk about that I think you're advocating for is what are the
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moments within that that matter?
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It's almost like what in the process of getting to this anticipated
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strategy is something that is useful or important
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that counts as one of those ingredients? So I want to run that past you and say,
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does that follow or am I missing something?
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It does.
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And I think those two things go together in a really important way because as
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you're talking about that pivotal moment in student thinking as
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they're coming to this new understanding,
23:28
as they're grappling with that mathematical idea and thinking
23:33
about what are the implications if we leverage that moment right there
23:38
to then ask more questions to connect different ways of
23:43
student thinking as compared to waiting till it's written down.
23:48
Because when it's written down,
23:50
that exciting moment of the new discovery has passed.
23:55
And so then when we want them to come revisit,
23:58
tell us what you were thinking when you did that.
24:00
They're having to rewind and go back and reenact that.
24:04
If we have the ability to capture those neurons
24:08
firing at full throttle in that moment of a new mathematical insight
24:13
and then use that to build on as a teacher and to really get where we want to go
24:18
with the lesson,
24:19
I feel like we're doing the right thing by kids by trying to seize
24:24
that moment to leverage it.
24:26
We always have time to write down what we think we learned later
24:30
on at the end of the lesson. It's a great task for homework.
24:34
And that's another thing I love about leaving some things unfinished with a
24:37
task. This is, that's just a delightful homework assignment.
24:41
And the kids love it because they don't feel like I've asked them to do anything
24:43
new. Just write down what you understood about this,
24:47
and now we're codifying it kind of at a different place in the process.
24:52
Well, okay,
24:53
and that makes me think about something else because you've helped me recognize
24:56
that I don't have to wait for a final solution in writing that's fleshed
25:01
out in order to start a whole group conversation.
25:04
But I think what you're saying is it changes the tone and
25:09
maybe also the purpose and the impact of that conversation on students.
25:14
Because if I have a task that I'm midway through and suddenly
25:19
there's a conversation that helps create some understanding, some aha moments.
25:24
If my task is unfinished and I had an aha,
25:28
I probably really want to go back to that and see if I can apply that. Aha.
25:32
And that's kind of cool to imagine like a classroom where you have a bunch of
25:36
kids dying to go back and see if they can figure out how they can put that to
25:40
use. Now you wouldn't always have to do that,
25:43
but that strikes me as different than a consolidation conversation where it's
25:47
kind of like, well, everything's finished. What have we learned?
25:50
Those are valuable. But I'm just really,
25:53
I think in love with the possibility that a conversation that doesn't
25:57
always wait until final solutions creates for learning.
26:03
And when I've seen this done effectively, there are these moments that happen,
26:08
Mike,
26:08
they're exactly what you're describing is that there's an insight that comes up
26:12
in the whole class conversation,
26:13
and you will see people going back to their paper or their tablet that they were
26:18
doing their original work on and start writing.
26:20
And we know oftentimes with kids,
26:22
I remember so many times in my classroom where we're having this discussion,
26:26
this important point comes up and everybody's kind of frozen. And I'm like, no,
26:30
you should write that down. That's the important thing. Write that down.
26:33
And when you see it happen organically,
26:35
it's because something really catalyzed in insight that was important
26:40
enough that they went back to that work and said, oh, I want to capture this.
26:46
So I'm wondering if there are habits of mind habits in
26:51
planning or habits in practice that we could distill
26:56
down.
26:56
So how would you unpack the things that a person might do if they're listening
27:00
and they're like, I want to do this today,
27:02
or I want to do this at my next planning.
27:04
Could you talk a little bit about what are the baby steps, so to speak,
27:08
for a person?
27:09
Yeah,
27:10
and I think the first one is really about getting into the mathematics and going
27:14
deep with the mathematics in the task that you're hoping to teach.
27:18
As somebody who is trained as a secondary math teacher, and early in my career,
27:22
I'm like, oh, I know what the math is.
27:24
I don't need to spend the time on the math.
27:26
I can't tell you how wrong I was about that.
27:29
So anticipating those ways of thinking, thinking about where those challenges,
27:34
that sort of thing is absolutely critically important to doing that work and
27:38
giving the time and space for that to happen. I mean,
27:41
it was almost without fail.
27:43
Every time I shorted myself on the time to think about the mathematics and just
27:48
popped open my instructional resource and said, here we go.
27:51
A class starts in five minutes. Let's get going on this.
27:54
I bump into things that I'm like, oh,
27:56
I wish I had thought about that mathematical idea first.
27:59
Or there'd be a question that would come up that I'd be totally unprepared to
28:03
answer and I could have been prepared to answer. Now,
28:06
we're not going to anticipate every way of thinking that students have or every
28:10
question that they'll have, but I always find that if I've thought through it,
28:14
I'm probably in a better position to give a meaningful answer
28:19
to it or ask a good question back in response.
28:22
And it also frees up my cognitive load to actually spend some time on those
28:26
questions that I didn't expect rather than trying to make sense of everything as
28:31
if it's the first time I'm seeing it. And then along with that,
28:35
doing this as a group,
28:37
we used to sit in our PLC sessions and start to
28:42
solve tasks together and share our thinking about, okay,
28:46
what are the mathematical ideas that we're really trying to take apart here?
28:50
And there were always insights that didn't occur to me that would occur to
28:52
somebody else. That added to my own thinking.
28:55
And now in an increasingly digitally connected age,
28:58
we don't necessarily have to be in the same room with people to do that.
29:01
We can do that at a distance and still be very effective.
29:04
And then the last thing I'll talk about here in terms of getting started is we
29:08
are so good as teachers at sharing an interesting task that we found
29:13
or that we used with our students, with our colleagues.
29:17
Here's this thing I use in my class. It was great.
29:20
You're a couple days behind me in the pacing.
29:23
Maybe you can use this next Tuesday.
29:26
What we I think are less good at is bringing back the outcomes of that and
29:30
talking about that. Here's what students did.
29:33
I loved it when we had opportunities to gather a group of teachers in the PLC
29:38
with student work from a task they did and talk about it and see
29:43
what did students make sense of?
29:44
What were the questions that I asked that were helpful or that maybe weren't
29:49
helpful in teaching that lesson because we'll share the task. But my goodness,
29:53
the questions that we came up with to ask students in the moment,
29:57
those are just as portable from one classroom to another.
30:00
And we should be thinking about just like we think about digital archives to
30:04
share those tasks and those lesson plans, like sharing those questions,
30:07
sharing that student work,
30:09
those are the other legs of that stool that are important for really helping us
30:13
do this work in a meaningful and collaborative way because we don't talk about
30:16
the outcomes of what students learned. The task could be great,
30:19
it could be interesting,
30:20
but so what's the important mathematical insights that kids took away from it?
30:26
Yeah, I'm kind of in love with this notion that in addition to sharing tasks,
30:29
sharing questions that really generated an impact in the classroom space
30:34
or sharing moments of insight that led to something
30:39
that jumped out.
30:40
It's fascinating to think about taking those ideas and building them into a
30:43
regular PLC process. It just has so much potential.
30:47
Before we close the conversation,
30:49
I wanted to ask you a question that I ask almost every guest.
30:53
If someone wanted to learn more about the ideas that you've shared today,
30:56
what are some of the resources you'd recommend?
30:59
Well,
30:59
I've talked quite a bit about the work of the five practices for orchestrating
31:03
productive discussions and that series of books that have been written over the
31:07
past 15 years on that the resources that are available online for that I think
31:11
would be a great place to start.
31:13
I've only scratched the surface at taking you through those five practices,
31:16
which are actually six practices,
31:18
because early on we realized that attention to the task we select and the goals
31:22
for that task is the important practice Zero. In fact,
31:25
it was a teacher that pointed that out to Peg Smith,
31:28
and that's the lovely thing.
31:29
So the reason I've stayed in touch with and helped to develop this work over the
31:33
years is because when we see teachers taking it up,
31:37
not only is it meaningful,
31:38
but the feedback we get from teachers then shapes the next things that we do
31:43
with it.
31:43
So there's the original five Practices book that kind of present the model,
31:47
show some examples of tasks and how you go through the model.
31:49
But then in 2019 and 2020,
31:53
we published a series called The Five Practices and Practice that there's a book
31:57
for each grade band, elementary, middle, and high school.
32:00
But those were the ones that really aggregated the challenges that we
32:05
heard from teachers over 10 years of doing this work and started to
32:10
address those challenges. How do you overcome those things? We also,
32:14
for each of those books,
32:15
there's brand new original video that we took in urban
32:19
classrooms that illustrated teachers working really effectively with the five
32:24
practices.
32:25
I was able to be in the room when we filmed all of the high school classrooms in
32:29
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it was just amazing to see that work.
32:34
And then the last piece that I'll suggest to that,
32:37
which is a book that came out relatively recently in that series,
32:41
there is a coaching the five practices book. So if you are a coach,
32:45
instructional leader who's looking to support a team and A PLC in doing exactly
32:50
this sort of work that we've been talking about, the coaching,
32:53
the Five Practices Book is an incredible resource for thinking about how you can
32:57
structure that work.
32:59
Okay. I have to also ask you,
33:00
can you give a shout out to the article that you recently wrote and published as
33:03
well, the title and where people could find it?
33:06
Absolutely. Yes. The article is called Pacing a Discourse Rich Lesson,
33:10
when to Move On,
33:11
and I authored it alongside an elementary and middle school teacher who
33:16
provided a reflection on it.
33:18
It comes from the classroom of a high school teacher,
33:21
Michael Moore in Milwaukee,
33:23
who we filmed for the five Practices high School book.
33:26
So I drew from his classroom and then Kara Benson in Zionsville Community
33:31
Schools right here in Zionsville, Indiana,
33:33
and Kelly Agnew who teaches in Muncie Community Schools,
33:37
which is where Ball State is located.
33:39
Each provided a reflection from an elementary and middle school standpoint about
33:43
the ideas in the article. It was published in nct, M'S practitioner journal,
33:48
mathematics teacher learning and teaching PK 12 in the volume one
33:53
18 issue 11 from November of 2025.
33:57
That's fantastic. And for listeners, just so you know,
33:59
we're going to put a link to all of the resources that Mike shared.
34:02
I think this is probably a good place to stop, Mike.
34:04
I suspect we could talk for much longer.
34:06
I just want to thank you though for taking the time to join the podcast.
34:08
It has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
34:11
The pleasure has been all mine. As you can tell.
34:14
I love talking about these ideas,
34:15
and I was so glad to have the opportunity to share a little bit of this with the
34:19
audience.
34:23
This podcast is brought to you by the Math Learning Center and the Meyer Math
34:26
Foundation dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to
34:31
discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability.