LTEC Retreat Recap

January 23, 2017

Happy 2017 to all!

The LTEC team kicked off the new year with a full-day retreat to share and discuss our work on the project thus far and to decide where we’re headed next.

We began the day by sharing our draft trajectories – yes, we have draft trajectories! – for sequencing and iteration. Right now, two versions of the trajectories exist for each of the two concept areas. One version was developed through synthesis of scholarly literature, and the other through analysis of math+CT lesson plans created by a group of passionate, dedicated teachers. To this point, we had intentionally kept the data sources separate. We were excited for the retreat’s big reveal of how the two versions of each trajectory might match up (or not).

We were pleased to find substantial overlap in content among the two versions of the trajectories. The big ideas that we synthesized from the literature were, for the most part, present in the lesson plans and vice versa. The manner in which the concepts developed, however, differed in an interesting way.

The synthesis of literature suggested ways in which understanding of broad concepts could be broken down into pieces, and partial orderings of how those pieces could be addressed in curriculum. The conceptual pieces underlying sequencing, for example, included (a) the importance of specificity in instructions, (b) the impact of the order of instructions on outcomes, and (c) the default order of execution typically used by a computer. Based on our examination of results reported in literature, we speculate that (a) and (b) might be best addressed separately before expecting children to coordinate the two, and that considering the impact of order of instructions outside the context of programming may be a helpful prerequisite for later understanding of default order of execution. These are hypotheses based on our synthesis that merit further investigation.

The development of concepts in the lesson plans, by contrast, tended to address big ideas head on. Growth across the grade levels occurred via the complexity of the programming projects that students completed. That is, rather than addressing the idea itself in a progressive manner, the lesson plans asked children to use the idea in more and more complex contexts. We see this as a potential application of Papert’s (1996) power principle, which says, “… ‘[W]hat comes first, using it or ‘getting it’?’ The natural mode of acquiring most knowledge is through use leading to progressively deepening understanding” ¹.

We spent a fair amount of time considering how these two approaches to progression, each of which seemed to have potential, might be best brought together. In the end, we decided that one of our goals for the next year would be to explore the idea of using the progression from the literature (separating components of a big idea and then coordinating them) to order activities within a school year, and using the progression from the lesson plans (increasing complexity of application) across school years. This may provide an interesting mechanism for producing a “spiral” of CT activities through the elementary grades, an approach that is already present for mathematics activities in Everyday Mathematics.

We’re excited to take a closer look at how the lit-based trajectories might influence the lesson plans and vice versa, and expect this work to continue as part of the STEM+C initiative. Stay tuned.