According to my observations of social media, the pedagogical activity of “I do, we do, you do” has become very popular in the last decade. It’s been sold, in many cases, as not only the way to run an activity but also to organise an entire lesson, no matter the subject or its content. It’s a bona fide generic format.

I’ll question this assumption in this post and propose an alternative perspective.

Where does it fit?

I enact this format in my teaching when I’m teaching procedural knowledge. This is content for developing a skill and an activity with sequential steps.

When I teach students how to solve questions that involve mathematical equations, I may show my students first, help them through some easier steps, and then let them practice independently.

But this is rare, and, as I’ll point out in a moment, "I do, we do, you do" isn’t enacted as it sounds. Equally important to consider is that any procedures we do teach are often embedded in conceptual knowledge.

Where doesn’t it fit?

The format doesn’t work for anything that doesn’t involve learning an algorithmic process to carry out sequentially.

Accepting the rough distinction between procedural and conceptual knowledge, it doesn’t work for the latter.

For example, lessons on evolution by natural selection aren’t about learning a step-by-step sequence to enact. It’s conceptual; an idea to think with and make inferences. There are no sequential steps to carry out, but many interconnected ideas that bring forth a new way of interpreting the world.

To think with natural selection, you must understand its fundamental assumptions and bring them together in your mind simultaneously, not sequentially.

What happens when conceptual ideas are taught through “I do, we do, you do”? I’ve seen this through examples given on social media. It goes like this:

A teacher explains while students listen,
The students are helped to answer simple questions, and
The students answer some questions independently of the teacher.

Why is this a problem? Conceptual understanding is likely backgrounded. Brought to the foreground is the correct procedure for answering any questions. This may be simply restating the teacher’s explanation in the correct format.

The teacher tells it (I do), the students fill in some gaps of the explanation with the help of some scaffolding (we do), then students re-produce the explanations alone (you do).

In other words:

I tell the meaning,
I help you restate the meanings, and
You restate the meanings independently.

If students can explain a phenomenon, they have learnt something. But have they learnt to think with the concept or provide the words in the right format?

When students can reliably reproduce the original explanation, the “I do, we do, you do” format is considered a success. But how could we know what meaning they have made of the concept?

There’s something wrong here, and I think it has something to do with the name “I do, we do, you do”. It focuses on the wrong aspect: who is acting.

Loops of “we do”

Information theory revealed that meanings aren’t transmitted in communication (Shannon 1948). Instead, signals (such as words, spoken or noted on paper, or electrical signals down a wire) are transmitted. A listener sensing those signals has to discern their meaning by themselves.

Meaning can’t be transmitted. Let’s take this as a fundamental premise and see how a different format emerges:

I begin a lesson talking about natural selection, and I realise that I need my students to make meaning of the ideas of variety and selection. By explaining, I prompt them to discern a meaning in their mind.

But what are they thinking? Are they making meaning of the idea in a compatible way with my meaning? I don’t know, so I decide to ask a question. By doing so, the students are prompted to think again. I give them a moment in pairs to trial their thinking and then solicit answers.

But what I hear now prompts me to think and act in response. My actions (the explanation, the question) prompted my students to mentally act. They responded, which triggered a response in my thinking and future actions.

Suddenly, we lose sight of the linear format of I do, we do, you do. More prompts follow, as do student responses, and a feedback loop emerges. It’s circular. It’s a sort of co-regulation through interactions. The class converses recursively in a continual “we do”.

When a teacher acts, it’s impossible not to respond to students. What most teachers hated about online lessons during covid was the lack of direct perception of student responses. Even if students don’t answer questions directly, we respond to their body language and facial expressions. Adaptation is a constant in living organisms.

The wrong focus

“I do, we do, you do” focuses on who acts in sequence. The adaptation was pre-designed into the lesson before even meeting the students.

When we consider teaching in continual loops of conversation and adaptation, other aspects become important:

What do student responses tell us about what they understand?
How much support do the students need right now?
What activities/questions could yield rich and regular feedback about understanding?

Imagine teaching through “I do, we do, you do” and only realising at the “we do” phase that your students didn’t understand anything. Would you then just return to the “I do” phase to re-explain? It didn’t work the first time, so why would it work the second? How would you know if the second attempt is succeeding where the first failed? You’d begin asking questions and responding during the explanation.

Adaptation becomes a constant classroom activity; the teacher continually guides and supports, depending on real-time feedback loops. The more frequent and richer the feedback loops circulate through the classroom, the stronger the co-regulation between the students and teachers.

The teacher’s actions depend on the students’ responses

Rather than an “I do” explanation linearly told to students, each utterance is a small arc of a larger circle. The systems theorist Gregory Bateson (1972) encapsulated this vision in a story about a logger.

As the logger cuts a tree with an axe, he adapts to the weight and feel of the axe as it swings. The incision made in the wood also informs his next move; should he swing harder, softer, or at a different angle? As the next incision is made, the process repeats iteratively. Bateson’s view was that the logger didn’t fell the tree alone. He continually responded to the axe’s movement and the tree’s reaction; the logger, axe, and tree felled the tree together.

Equally, when teachers step into the classroom, we never act alone. There is no “I do”. Each of our actions is a response, a small arc, in a continual loop consisting of ourselves, our tools, and our students. This is recursive teaching.

A lesson on conceptual knowledge emerges. It isn’t a premeditated march through “I do, we do, you do”. As the logger co-acts with the tree, teachers and students co-adapt to co-construct understanding. Therefore, we should take the focus away from “teaching to” students in the format “I do, we do, you do” and embrace “teaching with” students. How to do this is the focus of my book, Difference Maker.

References

Shannon, C. 1948. “The Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell Systems Technical Journal 27: 379–423 & 623–656.

Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. USA: Jason Aronson Inc.

Is "I do, we do, you do" the right vision of a lesson?