A pattern-based approach: Identifying and leveraging the presence and prevalence of ways-of-thinking in groups of learners, across scales

The in-situ work of classroom educators must attend to the needs of groups of learners—making instructional decisions about the use of time and resources to support collective learning. It is vital, then, to identify integrated approaches to assessment and instruction that are responsive to the group nature of classrooms, surfacing patterns in student’s current ways of thinking that can then drive rich assessment conversations and instructional activity. This article describes the pattern-based approach, which comprises a range of classroom activity types–from open-ended generative activities to closed-form pattern-based questions, or PBQs. In this article, we highlight PBQs and their potential to convey information about groups that can inform instructional decision making, across scales. We first place PBQs in historical context; then we describe our classroom-level work with teachers to implement pattern-based assessment and our statewide implementation of PBQs in Texas, USA, involving over four hundred thousand students.