Module 4 Activity 3f: Try an Introductory Pattern Talk in your classroom

Note: It is tempting to move quickly from the introductory pattern talk into the extended pattern talk. Even if your students are older or have experience working with visual patterns, our experience in classrooms has consistently shown that spending some time focusing only on describing the pattern (as in the introductory pattern talk) is beneficial. For this reason, we encourage PLCs to try an introductory pattern talk in their classrooms and debrief that experience before moving on to the extended pattern talk.

Application to Your Classroom, Part 1

How will you apply this module?

With your PLC, discuss how you will apply the ideas from this module in your classrooms.

Choose an Introductory Pattern Talk to try in your classroom. As a PLC, decide if everyone will do identical tasks in their classrooms or if you will adapt tasks for different classrooms. We recommend everyone in the PLC do the same pattern talk to facilitate conversation. We also recommend choosing one of the premade pattern talks from this section to try in your classroom. You may wish to adapt portions to fit your students' understanding and needs. Editable handouts are included in this section.
Discuss how you will plan to support students in connecting symbolic expressions and visual representations in ways that reveal the underlying structure of the situation. What questions will you ask? What prompts will you give? What examples will you use?
Decide on the data you would like each person to collect and bring back to the PLC after trying this in their classroom.

Application to Your Classroom, Part 2

After all members of the PLC have had a chance to try an Introductory Pattern Talk in their classrooms, discuss the results. Each member of the PLC should bring one or more artifacts from their classroom such as student work from the activity, pictures of what you wrote on the board during the activity, or video from your teaching to support this discussion.

To guide your discussion of the data, we have provided a discussion structure adapted from the protocol, "Save the Last Word for ME Links to an external site.." This protocol is designed to support a focused discussion about classroom data.

Discuss outcomes with PLC

Choose a timekeeper (who also participates). Read the through the protocol steps and decide as a PLC the length of time you would like to spend on steps 4-7.
Each participant identifies a significant idea or aspect of the classroom artifact(s) that they brought to the PLC meeting (e.g. student work, a picture of what was written on the board during the whole class discussion, or a snippet of video).
When all members of the group are ready, one person volunteers to be the presenter. The presenter briefly describes the class where the artifact was collected and then presents the classroom artifact. At this time, the presenter should avoid giving too much information and specifically not state what he/she noticed in the artifact, what he/she found interesting, or why this artifact was chosen. Please let the artifact speak for itself and avoid describing student work as being high, medium, or low.
All members of the group pause for a moment to silently consider the artifact before moving to the next step.
Other members of the PLC (not the presenter) discuss what they notice and wonder about the artifact. The presenter is silent and taking notes during this time. Typically, 3-5 minutes for this step is a good length of time.
The presenter then has time (3-5 minutes) to explain why he/she chose the artifact and to respond to and build on what he/she heard from the others during Step 5.
Repeat steps 3-6 until all members of the PLC have had a chance to be the presenter and to have “the last word.”
End with an open dialogue about the artifacts. What questions and ideas were raised that you want to follow up on? What next steps will you take?