Season 4 | Episode 7 - Tutita Casa, Anna Strauss, Jenna Waggoner & Mhret Wondmagegne, Developing Student Agency: The Strategy Showcase

Tutita Casa, Anna Strauss, Jenna Waggoner & Mhret Wondmagegne, Developing Student Agency: The Strategy Showcase

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 7

When students aren't sure how to approach a problem, many of them default to asking the teacher for help. This tendency is one of the central challenges of teaching: walking the fine line between offering support and inadvertently cultivating dependence. 

In this episode, we're talking with a team of educators about a practice called the strategy showcase, designed to foster collaboration and help students engage with their peers' ideas. 

BIOGRAPHIES

Tutita Casa is an associate professor of elementary mathematics education at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut.

Mhret Wondmagegne, Anna Strauss, and Jenna Waggoner are all recent graduates of the University of Connecticut School of Education and early career elementary educators who recently completed their first years of teaching.

RESOURCE

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Wallus: Well, we have a full show today and I want to welcome all of our guests. So Anna, Mhret, Jenna, Tutita, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to be talking with you all about the strategy showcase.

Jenna Waggoner: Thank you. 

Tutita Casa: It's our pleasure. 

Anna Strauss: Thanks. 

Mhret Wondmagegne: Thank you.

Mike: So for listeners who've not read your article, Anna, could you briefly describe a strategy showcase? So what is it and what could it look like in an elementary classroom?

Anna: So the main idea of the strategy showcase is to have students' work displayed either on a bulletin board—I know Mhret and Jenna, some of them use posters or whiteboards. It's a place where students can display work that they've either started or that they've completed, and to become a resource for other students to use. It has different strategies that either students identified or you identified that serves as a place for students to go and reference if they need help on a problem or they're stuck, and it's just a good way to have student work up in the classroom and give students confidence to have their work be used as a resource for others.

Mike: That was really helpful. I have a picture in my mind of what you're talking about, and I think for a lot of educators that's a really important starting point. 

Something that really stood out for me in what you said just now, but even in our preparation for the interview, is the idea that this strategy showcase grew out of a common problem of practice that you all and many teachers face. And I'm wondering if we can explore that a little bit. So Tutita, I'm wondering if you could talk about what Anna and Jenna and Mhret were seeing and maybe set the stage for the problem of practice that they were working on and the things that may have led into the design of the strategy showcase.

Tutita: Yeah. I had the pleasure of teaching my coauthors when they were master's students, and a lot of what we talk about in our teacher prep program is how can we get our students to express their own reasoning? And that's been a problem of practice for decades now. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has led that work. And to me, [what] I see is that idea of letting go and really being curious about where students are coming from. So that reasoning is really theirs. So the question is what can teachers do? And I think at the core of that is really trying to find out what might be limiting students in that work. And so Anna, Jenna, and Mhret, one of the issues that they kept bringing back to our university classroom is just being bothered by the fact that their students across the elementary grades were just lacking the confidence, and they knew that their students were more than capable.

Mike: Jenna, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, what did that actually look like? I'm trying to imagine what that lack of confidence translated into. What you were seeing potentially or what you and Anna and Mhret were seeing in classrooms that led you to this work.

Jenna: Yeah, I know definitely we were reflecting, we were all in upper elementary, but we were also across grade levels anywhere from fourth to fifth grade all the way to sixth and seventh. And across all of those places, when we would give students especially a word prob