The Paradigms Model for Teaching

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Section 1.2 The Paradigms Model for Teaching

In Paradigms classes, we use responsive teaching methods with active-engagement pedagogical strategies. As defined by researchers at Tufts [3], “Responsive teaching refers to practices of attending and responding to the substance of students' thinking. It begins with eliciting students' engagement around some launching question, or sometimes with discovering its spontaneous emergence. From there, the teacher's role is to support that engagement and attend to it—watch and listen to the students' thinking, form a sense of what they are doing, and identify productive beginnings of scientific thinking. In this way, the teacher may select and pursue a more specific target in a manner that recognizes and builds on what students have begun.”

This type of teaching can only exist in an active-engagement setting. We employ a wide-variety of active-engagement strategies, e.g. using visualization and kinesthetic activities for geometric content, or small-group problem solving activities to teach the use of various representations. All of these strategies increase communication from the students to the instructors so that we can make appropriate adjustments both on the fly in the current classroom and in subsequent years.

One way of evaluating our work is to compare ourselves to the literature that looks at teaching in a holistic mode. For example, we believe that we are attending to all Five Dimensions of Powerful Classrooms as articulated by Alan Schoenfeld's TRU Framework from the Mathematics Assessment Project: Teaching for Robust Understanding [4] “Classrooms that do well on these 5 dimensions produce students who are powerful thinkers: The Content, Cognitive Demand, Equitable Access to Content, Agency, Authority and Identity; Formative Assessment.”