Noelle Kreider's Profile

teams that meet regularly to discuss their students' progress and learn from one another's teaching successes and failures.

teachers take the time for more hands-on lessons, more visual cues and more real-world examples. They also do more to check that all the students have a topic down before they move on.

More improvement is needed because Oregon's math achievement is still pretty average when compared with other states', and too many students still arrive at high school unprepared for Algebra I,

"Now it's hands-on, it's visual, it's more conceptual. Teachers build understanding in different ways, not just one way, the teacher's way."

Whereas chunking involves the size of the bites for new content, scaffolding involves the content
of the bites and their logical order.

Interacting refers to how students process the information in each chunk. One common way to facilitate processing is to organize students in groups and ask each group to summarize the content in the chunk, identify what was confusing, try to clear up the confusion, and predict what information might be found in the next chunk.

One technique, response chaining, involves having students respond to the answers of other students. Students can agree with, disagree with, or add to a response. Another technique is to use the voting technologies that frequently come with interactive white boards.

pacing involves the extent to which a teacher moves through chunks at an appropriate pace—not too fast and not too slow.

Monitoring involves continually checking for student understanding. If students do not understand the content in a particular chunk, the teacher revisits or reteaches that information before moving on to another chunk.

Scaffolding is the keystone of the entire process. If the content of the chunks does not follow a logical progression to a clear goal, the rest of the process is not as effective in enhancing student learning.

A necessary component of interacting is keeping the student response rate high.

Monitoring should be a natural outcome of effective interaction.

Teachers cannot easily predetermine their pacing. Rather, they must continually read student engagement levels and adjust the pace accordingly.