An Alternative to I/We/You

Instead of gradual release of responsibility, try gradual increase in difficulty

Gradual Release of Responsibility

I’m not a fan of I/we/you lessons.

I/we/you is the default lesson structure for lots of math teachers. Start by modeling a skill. Then work through the skill as a class. Then give students some independent practice.

The tagline for this type of teaching is “gradual release of responsibility.” A graph of the lesson might look like this:

Take the task you want students to be able to do. Start by offering a lot of support, typically by modeling or looking at examples, then gradually have the students do more of the work themselves until they’re doing the task on their own.

I don’t think this is a good model. Instead of I/we/you with gradual release of responsibility, I think it‘s more helpful to think of a gradual increase in difficulty.

Gradual Increase in Difficulty

Gradual increase in difficulty might look like this:

But that’s actually not realistic. The stuff we want kids to learn doesn’t break down into nice neat steps that are all the same size. Maybe a lesson looks more like this:

I’m not putting teacher support on here, because it’s not some predetermined gradual release in responsibility. Instead it’s adaptive: some steps are small and students can make the jump without much support. Others are trickier and require more support.

Here’s what this might look like in terms of I/we/you:

You/I/you/you/I/you (this is a bunch of review questions about relevant prior knowledge, with some quick reteaches as necessary)

I/we/you (there’s a jump in difficulty that students need some support with)

I/you/I/you (this is two quick cycles for small, manageable chunks of new learning building on the last step)

You/you (this is a few more jumps in difficulty, but smaller jumps that students can do on their own)

I/you (one final model and then some more practice)

The key to making all this work is to break learning down into small, manageable steps, and help students connect each new step to what came before it. This is a big mental shift from teaching one objective at a time. It requires knowing your content well. It also means tossing out some of the curricular resources you might’ve been given.

I’m sure some people are saying, “Hey, this is how I teach, and I call this I/we/you.” Great! Glad we agree. My experience is that what I’m describing is very different from how most teachers conceptualize I/we/you. This is not a “gradual release” model — the support varies across the lesson, with students doing plenty on their own very early on. There’s some I/we/you within the lesson, but it doesn’t start with the “I” chunk and I don’t think I/we/you is a good way to describe this type of teaching. I/we/you is a tool. It’s useful at some specific places in a lesson, but not a structure for entire lessons.

Some Benefits

Here are some benefits of the gradual increase in difficulty approach:

• Review is so important. Review to improve retention of what was taught yesterday, to activate prior knowledge, to check prerequisite knowledge and reteach if necessary. When done well, review can also build confidence early in a lesson. I realize there is no rule saying “no review is allowed in I/we/you lessons.” But if the name of the teaching strategy begins with the “I” section, that will inevitably push teachers away from starting with review.

• There are no sudden jumps in difficulty. I’ve seen — and taught — plenty of I/we/you lessons that are a bit of a mess. The jump in difficulty is just too big. The teacher knows it’s a bit of a mess, so the “I” and “we” stages drag on. There’s not much time left for independent practice, half the class is confused, and it all ends in a muddle. I can’t promise you that a gradual-increase-in-difficulty lesson will go smoothly. That’s not how teaching works. But by approaching learning one small step at a time it’s much less likely to fall apart completely. Maybe students are shaky on some of the early steps, and they take longer than you would like. Maybe you don’t get through everything you planned. Much better to teach the first few steps well than to bite off more than you can chew and have to start from scratch the next day.

• There are fewer artificial divisions between objectives. I/we/you lessons break content down into lesson-size chunks. Here is today’s objective, then tomorrow’s, then the next day’s. Unfortunately, learning doesn’t always fit neatly into those chunks. Some days will be too much, some will be too easy. Focusing on a gradual increase in difficulty throws out those distinctions. It’s a gradual ramp, and you get through what you get through in each lesson.

• There are more opportunities to check for understanding. It is possible to check for understanding in the “I” and “we” stages of an I/we/you lesson. But it’s not easy. The entire premise is a gradual release of responsibility, so students aren’t doing the task independently until the “you” stage. A gradual increase of difficulty lesson involves lots of “you” throughout the entire lesson. You have lots of chances to check for understanding, reteach, support specific students, and adjust as you go.

• Students are more motivated when they can successfully solve problems early in a lesson. Get students doing math and building confidence as early as you can, and use that confidence to tackle more challenging problems.

• The teacher support is dynamic. For some tasks, students need a lot of guidance. You can provide that. For others, students can extend what they know with much less support. You can do that too. The key is the gradual increase in difficulty, and that helps to reduce teacher talk and get students doing as much of the thinking as possible.

• It’s easier to interleave. Interleaving different skills is a key aspect of increasing difficulty that’s often forgotten until the review day before the test. Students need mixed practice, identifying different types of questions and applying different solution strategies. In a typical I/we/you structure, each objective lives in its own world. In a gradual increase in difficulty, many of those small steps are just interleaved practice between distinct skills.

• It’s easier to include challenging, non-routine problems. In an I/we/you structure, more challenging problems are often saved until the end of the unit, or for specific objectives like “solve multi-step problems.” In this model, the gradual increase in difficulty means that I can often end classes by challenging students to apply what they’ve learned in a few different and non-routine ways, rather than being laser focused on one very specific objective.

• I spend less time explaining. Lots of explanations go on too long because students don’t have solid prior knowledge, or the jump in difficulty is too big, or the teacher feels like they need to explain everything about a topic before students try it. In a gradual increase in difficulty model, there’s a bunch of work to prepare students for the explanations I do include. But those explanations happen in small chunks that are only slightly more difficult than the last step, and when students can figure something out themselves I let them do so. All that adds up to way less time explaining. I’m not against explaining — teachers should explain things to students! But those explanations should be short, and should get students doing math as soon as possible.

I realize that the difference between a gradual release of responsibility and a gradual increase in difficulty may seem small. But I think it’s a really valuable paradigm shift, and it opens up a ton of opportunities that are lost in a typical I/we/you structure. I/we/you isn’t totally broken — I use it as one element of the gradual increase approach. But it’s just one strategy for me, rather than a way to structure an entire lesson. Whenever I think about teaching a new topic, I start by finding ways to break that topic down into small chunks and sequencing those chunks in a gradual increase in difficulty. It’s not easy as first. But the more I’ve practiced breaking topics down into small, manageable bits, the more this type of teaching makes sense to me.