Raising Students’ Voices in STEM Classes, For Real
“When you teach or observe instruction, how much talking is the teacher doing? How much talking are the students doing? What are the ratios? What if there was a tool that could measure and report back the quantity and quality of conversations that occur in the classroom?”
These are the questions Dr. Leena Bakshi used to frame her recent conversation with our own Resego Mooki.
Resego, a former middle school science teacher, has been partnering with Dr. Bakshi to integrate TeachFX into STEM4Real’s work, leveraging our AI-powered instructional coaching app as a tool for expanding educational equity and increasing academic discourse in a number of k-12 schools.
Dr. Bakshi, a STEM education disruptor, social justice advocate, is the founder of the nonprofit, Stem4Real and host of the podcast, Teaching Stem 4 Real – the podcast exploring anti-racist and socially just instruction in our classrooms, schools, and beyond.
Read on for the highlights – or listen to the full episode here.
The following excerpts of the conversation have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Equity, social justice, and critical consciousness in k-12 classrooms
How did your journey as an educator began and how did those initial experiences influence your approach to teaching students?
I was really blessed to start my teaching career at a school in southeast LA with a school leader who was absolutely incredible.
When I say incredible, he was doing things that were pushing the status quo.
He talked all about equity, social justice, critical consciousness - he was actually about it. Our mission, our vision, our values, even my own science-specific vision as a founding science teacher, all included language addressing prejudice, discrimination, racism, and anti-Blackness.
And as a community, we always tried to make sure that our curriculum and the content we were putting in front of our kids were equity-based and culturally relevant.
We always tried to elevate our students' voices and make sure that their identities were celebrated and that we wanted them to feel proud of who they were, feel a sense of belonging, feel connected to their community, and ultimately to love school.
That became my goal as a teacher – and especially as a science teacher. I wanted kids to love coming to my class every day. I wanted them to feel heard and feel seen and really just engage with the content even though it can be challenging.
Finding a better way to see and celebrate teaching to raise up students’ voices in the classroom
How did you come across TeachFX, and what made you believe it could be the solution to the challenges you faced gathering evidence of student dialogue?
I stumbled on TeachFX as a teacher. I was clearing my credential, in my induction program, and I was just Google searching: “easy way to collect evidence”. Then I thought there's gotta be an easier way.
TeachFX makes it simple to gather evidence of student dialogue in the classroom, teacher questioning technique, and more.
It’s as simple as pressing record. And the app does the rest.
Our mission at TeachFX is to promote more meaningful and equitable dialogue by superpowering teachers' work.
And we do that partly by using an instructional coaching app that provides teachers with embedded, ongoing, routine feedback on their practice.
Because our mission is anchored in three key research principles:
Student voice: We know that students need to speak in order to learn.
Equity: We know that special populations benefit the most from talking in class, but usually get less opportunities to do so. That includes our plurilingual learners, students with disabilities, and Black and Brown students.
Feedback: In order to improve, teachers need frequent feedback that's objective and non-judgmental. TeachFX was started because we saw a need for this.
We know that discourse is important and that facilitating classroom discourse is one of the highest leverage instructional practices a teacher can develop.
When teachers facilitate meaningful, equitable classroom conversation, students get to share their ideas and teachers get to hear what they're thinking. And it's a great way to increase student engagement, enable deeper learning. And hearing your students speak, it’s a great way to formatively assess where your students are.
Especially in STEM classes – I think of my science class and like the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) standards – student talk is a major part of that, effective questioning is a major part of that. Students have to provide a claim and provide evidence and reasoning to support their claim. And TeachFX can allow a teacher to go back and listen to those moments when students are doing that kind of talking. And, getting students to talk is just really critical because you can learn so much from listening to them.
Who's talking in our classrooms, and who isn’t?
Teachers often face challenges in promoting student engagement and giving students a voice in the classroom. How does TeachFX help teachers address these challenges and foster an interactive and student-centered learning environment?
We're here to help empower teachers to facilitate learning, rather than lecture.
Decades of research, from John Hattie and others, show that teachers talk nearly 80% of the time on average. There's a huge lever to drive change there.
We also want teachers to feel like they're in the driver's seat of their own professional growth and learning. With the TeachFX app, they’re getting this feedback that's private to them can be really powerful.
It's a vulnerable practice, but with TeachFX, teachers are able to ask themselves questions like:
Am I giving my students voice?
What percentage of the time am I speaking versus them?
Are I students using academic language?
Am I modeling the academic language I want them to use?
When did they speak the most?
What open-ended questions did I ask that got students engaged the most?
Did I remember to use wait time to allow them to do the thinking cognitive lifts?
All of these are insights that we can provide in the TeachFX app. And each one helps teachers to improve their craft for a better learning environment for their students.
Feedback that’s private, non-evaluative, and here whenever teachers want it
How does TeachFX encourage a culture of continuous improvement among teachers and fosters a sense of ownership over their professional development?
We’re here to build teachers' capacity, and we make sure they know that this is not a kind of “gotcha” tool. The admin can't see into teachers’ class reports unless they choose to share them. They can delete a class report whenever they want. We built this app to create a safe space for teachers to reflect on their own practice; we assure them that this really is their data, and it's for them to use it for their own development and reflection.
Administrators & Coaches
Classroom Teachers
