After teaching the lesson, Peg began the debriefing. She expressed overall satisfaction
with how the lesson proceeded, but acknowledged she was “more nervous than
she expected to be” with observers in the room. She expressed concern that the lesson
had not been as successful as she hoped because some groups had not put their
problems in order on the chart paper, making it impossible to line them up when
placed on the board. She felt that the goal of comparing and contrasting the problem
types was not reached because the children could not see the relationships visually.
After she was done, each teacher shared his or her observations of individual students
and groups, and what they had observed about the students. During that time,
the facilitators took notes. After all teachers shared, the facilitators raised questions
to stimulate development of the lenses that would encourage rich discussion about
the mathematics and student learning. For example, from this initial lesson they
asked:
• What do you think about the difficulty level of the problems? [Student lens]
• Do you think the order in which the problems were solved/presented impacted
student understanding? [Curriculum developer lens]
• Did you notice dominant students in the groups? Do you think that impacted the
learning? What could we do to limit that in future group work? [Researcher lens]
As experienced observers of classroom interactions, the facilitators were accustomed
to carefully watching and listening to students, noticing themes, and raising
questions about what they observed. The questions they raised emerged from the
discussion, but were not ideas that the teachers addressed directly in the discussion.
The questions were designed to move the teachers beyond the limits of their