Eliciting and responding productively to student thinking is the core work of teaching. Children’s ideas are fundamental resources for instruction, and teachers deliberately unpack each student’s thinking and use what they learn to design instruction for that student and for the whole class. They seek to understand students’ ideas, questions, and ways of thinking, including possible misconceptions, and work continuously to identify students’ strengths and areas for growth. Teachers draw out student thinking and skills through carefully chosen questions and tasks, and attend closely to what students do and say. They consider and check alternative interpretations of student ideas and methods. Teachers are attentive to how students might hear their questions and to how students communicate their own thinking. Teachers use what they learn about student thinking for formative assessment, to guide instructional decisions, and to surface ideas that will benefit other students.
When teachers understand and appreciate a student’s thinking, they are better able to support that student to contribute in class and to position them as capable among their peers. Patterns of inequity lead to the risk that some students’ thinking will get prioritized in the classroom, while the thinking of others will be seen through deficit lenses. Teachers must be attentive to disrupting these kinds of patterns both in how they interact with individual students as well as in whose thinking is publicly elicited, raised up, and responded to. Teachers’ interpretations of students are often biased by patterns related to race, gender, and other social identities. Interrupting those biases requires listening with a broad understanding of the subject area and a commitment to recognizing the many assets each student brings to school.
The diagram below breaks down work that teachers do when they are eliciting and interpreting student thinking. This breakdown, or decomposition, helps teacher educators to break down the practice into a set of parts that can be observed and practiced.
