Scheduling. We knew we needed and wanted large blocks of time during the regular school day to team teach and work with the kids. But at the time when we started the project, RMS was not doing any block scheduling, so that was an obstacle. Our principal was very supportive and would hire substitute teachers to cover our classes when possible.

Resources. The more we did on the project, the more we wanted to do. We had ideas about materials we needed, technology that would enhance our instruction, but we had to keep the scope of the project manageable.

Time. Even though we tried to keep the scope of TTAAP project small, we were surprised by how much work it was to actually implement the ideas into our teaching. Between planning, and meeting, and all the miscellaneous micro-tasking that we knew we’d do, we found we still underestimated how much time we’d need to get the students’ projects done. We thought it would be a six-week project, it ended up taking us ten!

Scatter. Besides TTAAP, we still had to teach our classes, attend school meetings, talk to parents, and so on. Even though we enjoy doing the TTAAP project, we found it difficult to make time for it in an already overstuffed school day.

Thinking like researchers. We had to train ourselves to deliberately step back, analyze our lessons, identify conceptual gaps, challenge assumptions we were making, solve problems, and be organized. We had to maintain a fresh sense of what was working and what wasn’t, and that forced us to take a close look at many aspects of our teaching across the curriculum.

Figuring out next steps. Each time we’d come up with an idea, or try a transfer lesson, we find ourselves faced with the same question: Now what? Learning how to systematically follow a line of instructional inquiry required patience and a certain comfort with being confused and unsure about our direction and our thinking.

Assessment. We spent a lot of time figuring out what would count as transfer. How would we set criteria? What standards would we use? How would we communicate our expectations to students? We constructed a transfer rubric with our students that set criteria for knowledge in a subject and depth of understanding of a specific theme or idea across music, art, and language arts. We also worked hard on figuring out how to assess ourselves. We needed to be clear about how to formally evaluate our own development as teacher/researchers for the Spencer Foundation.

The Instructional Interventions. Part of the TTAAP project involves experimenting with a number of instructional interventions for cultivating transfer. While we realize that teaching for transfer involves infusing a wide range or instructional practices and techniques, we wanted to explore the impact of a few techniques specifically: 1) infusing self-assessments, 2) infusing thinking-centered strategies, 3) infusing a language of thinking vocabulary into the regular curriculum. We worked long and hard on figuring what our research questions would be and how we’d investigate them.

Read the action guide.

© Rochester Memorial Elementary School. Old Rochester Regional School Department. Rochester, MA 1999.
 

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