CGI: My Story!

Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI)

If you google CGI you get a lot of hits for stuff that isn't CGI. One example is the small letters cgi mean computer generated imagery, or computer generated interface. There is also the Clinton Global Initiative in all caps. The other thing you get, even when you spell it out, is a bunch of stuff that doesn't exactly match the intent of Cognitively Guided Instruction. But the major hits will get you to the big ideas and there is even a wikipedia page and several interesting entries on Pinterest. Click the hot link above if you want to find out more.

Fundamentally, CGI is a professional development program based on extensive research on children's mathematical thinking. What teachers learn in a CGI workshop can support their ability to provide meaningful mathematics instruction based on problem solving. The basis for the program is two frameworks, one which organizes the problem types and another which outlines the strategies. Important for teachers to learn is that using the problem types and the strategies during instruction does not work unless the two frameworks are used together. Teachers who use the frameworks effectively consider the use of problem types as a way to develop strategies and the strategies students use as a way to inform which problem type to offer next. teachers who use CGI most productively have learned to really listen to their students, and respond thoughtfully to their thinking.

MY STORY

I got involved with CGI by pure happenstance in 1991. While up at school one day, preparing to get ready to teach in my 3rd year, I happened to stick my head in the door of the principal's office, just when she was notified that we would be getting extra funds to form pull out classes for students at risk of failing in math (Title One). One of my colleagues was in the office too and she was being offered the job. She turned it down, and my principal said to me, "What about out you?" I had been doing a lot of innovative summer school programs and was designated as the GT teacher in the previous year, as well as teaching math to  a 3rd, 4th and 5th grade class for a novel class assignment called Nesting with two other teachers. Either my principal knew I'd say yes to anything, or she had some level of confidence in me, but either way I said, "yes!"

That same summer, one of the math coordinators at the district level had just learned about a new program called Cognitively Guided Instruction that she thought would be perfect for all of the new math pull out programs. She scheduled Sue Gehn and Janice Gratch to come down in the fall of 1991 to provide us with a 4-day workshop. I, along with the other Title One math teachers in the district, got to attend the 4-day workshop in the first month of school that fall. The ideas in CGI clicked with me right away because my experience in teaching the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders as a part of the Nesting program, showed me that our approach to teaching math was not working.

In 1992, I moved and became a math facilitator in another school district (again in the role of the first person to hold that job), and in 1993, I arranged for Sue to come to my district to teach our teachers. Right away I started doing lots of CGI will all of my K-5 teachers and their students. I always say that I got the best start because I got to try lessons and problems and practice responding over and over in the same grades day after day (I had two schools and about 12 teachers in each grade level to work with). Three summers later I was teaching the CGI PD to my teachers. Fast forward to 2015, and I have my doctorate in math education, and continue to teach both preservice and inservice teachers about CGI, as well as guest teach in elementary classrooms as often as I can get away from my university job.

Truly, CGI has framed and guided my entire career, and I fully expect the residue to last until the end of my career. All of the posts on the blog reflect what I have learned as a CGI teacher. Hopefully, readers will get the message that I truly am interested in how people think about mathematics, and enjoy the power that understanding math can give people of they are given the opportunity to think.