I'm entering the home stretch of the year I've spent Building A Thinking Classroom In Mathematics. I've been documenting what I have learned and how it has gone since the very beginning in the hopes that those of you reading might have the chance to learn from my insights, successes, and failures experienced along the way. Many of you reading this are likely entering the home stretch of your school year as well, likely with some hopes, dreams, ideas, and ambitions for how you'll either start or grow a Thinking Classroom next year. In my experience, the last month or two of the school year are, hands down, the best time to start experimenting with goals or ideas you have for the following year. The beginning of the year is so hard for starting new projects. All the new school and district initiatives and all the extra work that come along with a new year can often derail our own, personal initiatives before they start. So if I have a goal for next year, I start it in April the year before. Starting in April has a lot of advantages when compared to starting in August. In April, unlike in August I already know my kids backwards and forwards. In April, unlike in August, my school and my district aren't pushing me to enact their new initiatives and goals. In April, unlike in August, all of my procedures and routines are air tight. In April, unlike in August, the kids are already pretty darn bored of whatever I've already been doing for the last six months. In April, unlike in August, most of the soon-to-be-tested curriculum is behind us, lowering the stakes a bit if the change doesn't go so well. In April, unlike in August, the time is ripe for getting a head start on my own new initiatives. If transitioning to a Thinking Classroom next year is something you're considering, I'd love to encourage you to consider starting now. And I'd like to help.
Idea #1 - Learn the Practices in Liljedahl's Order
BUT This method does require your very step to be a huge one - the tectonic shift from giving lessons to giving thinking tasks - right away. From what I've seen, not everybody is willing or able to make that their very first step. And if I had it to do over again, I don't think that's the first step I'd make again, either. Well, not exactly, at least. Instead, I'd make the transition by... Idea #2 - Add A Thinking/Predicting Block Ahead of Direct INstructionI see a lot of folks in the Building Thinking Classrooms community express discomfort with the idea of stopping direct instruction entirely. Some don't trust that it will work (reasonable), others are worried that their administrators, students, or parents will make a fuss if they stop (also reasonable), and others still just need to see kids actually learn without direct instruction before they give it up (yup, reasonable).
To make the first step in Building A Thinking Classroom a mild one, here's my idea. Let's suppose a typical math class is around an hour long and consists of two main parts:
In my prior, mimicking classroom my teaching-to-practice time split was about 40 minutes to 20 minutes (or 20 minutes to 40 minutes when I was using a flipped classroom). Visually, that would make a typical class look something like this:
If I had it to do over again, the first baby step I'd take in Building A Thinking Classroom would be to do two things:
The "prediction time" could be as simple as introducing them like this: "we've already learned to ______________. Today I want to extend that by teaching you how to ________________. But before I do, I want you to take some time and see what you can figure out on your own, first. Here are the type of problems we're going to do, organized from mild to spicy. With your group, what can you figure out without me, first?" And off they go to think. After this time, you teach the rest of the lesson as you normally would.
By easing in this way, you'll get to learn the following practices:
I experimented with adding a "prediction time" the year before I Built A Thinking Classroom, and I found that:
In addition to easing me into Building A Thinking Classroom, this change also improved my traditional classroom substantially!
Why not give it a try?Could the first step in Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics really be as simple as devoting a few minutes to saying "I'm going to teach you how to do this, but why not see if you can figure it out first"? I think it really might just be. If I were starting again, this is how I'd do it. It would give me and the kids a chance to get a feel for it with low stakes. Before long, I think I'd find several groups figuring out what to do without me. And I could mobilize that knowledge. And before you know it I'd be consolidating rather than teaching traditionally after the thinking time.
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One of the things I've been dying to see as I've built a Thinking Classroom in Mathematics this year is whether or not all the obvious benefits of the Building Thinking Classroom practices would translate into the currency of our educational time - test scores. I teach in a very, very large U.S. school district, which means my students take not only the state-mandated end-of-grade standardized tests, but also district-wide standardized mid-terms and final exams in every subject each semester. These are tests that cover the standards the district prescribes for the first half and then full term, and they are tests that I can't see ahead of time. They are pretty important for the kids and for me. The results are used, in part, to determine what math course opportunities the students get for the following year, they count as a decent chunk of their final grade, and they're analyzed heavily by my school and district leaders to evaluate how I'm doing as a teacher, too. My students did really, really well on their first semester exams. Beyond-my-wildest-dreams well, to be honest. We just reached the second semester mid-terms, so I thought I'd provide another standardized test results update. Was the first semester final just a flash-in-the-pan? It wasn't. Though it wasn't quite as spectacular this time, either. As I learn new classes and contents, I set four tiers of goals to reach:
For the first semester final, we hit level 4. I've never seen anything like it outside of when I taught sections of exclusively gifted students. For the recent 2nd semester mid-term, we exceeded level 3, but didn't make it to level 4. I've taught for a long time, and I take standardized test scores very seriously, so I had a pretty good gauge of how a given group of students would do on these tests in my traditional, mimicking classroom. With this particular group of kids at this particular time, I think they would have exceeded level 2, but not reached level 3 under normal circumstances. That's a guess, of course, but a pretty educated one based on a lot of experience. So just like first semester, I believe Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics moved us up a level in my test score tiers. Pretty great! If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Want to read more right now? You're in luck - this is my 84th post! You can browse past posts by category:
Thin-sliced curricular tasks have become a tool I use in my Thinking Classroom very, very often with great success. I've written about these once before - back when I was just learning to unlock their potential - and one of my earliest discoveries was this: The Magic Is In The MildI've only grown to be more certain of this truth ever since. Building A Thinking Classroom rests of a bold premise - kids are largely capable of figuring out rigorous mathematics on their own. And with the right fourteen practices in place, it turns out they truly can! On Thursday, I wanted my 6th graders to learn the concept of quartiles as a way of organizing a data set to answer a statistical question. Not a terribly difficult concept, but one I was worried I wouldn't be able to lead students to figure out on their own. But I decided to try. Whenever I'm worried that a concept will be something I can't frame in just the right way that students can walk into it on their own, I remind myself that: The magic is In THe Mild
1. Task LaunchEven before we get to the mild, I try to assure that I'm building the day's learning off of prior learning. I frame the start of every thin-sliced task launch with: You can already __________, but what about __________? For quartiles, that launch sounded like - "You can already answer statistical questions by finding the MEDIAN, which divides a data set into HALVES, but what about dividing data set into FOURTHS, called QUARTILES? - and the first, mildest question of the thinking tasks was on the screen to see. And boom, we're already thinking. 2. Heavily Scaffold The Mild QuestionsThe task launch - plus a little bit of wait time - had the kids chomping at the bit to get started. Most of them could already see the path forward from the screen example, and couldn't wait to rush to their board to show me how quickly they had figured out my new task. That's the magic of the mild. The mild questions were so scaffolded - exactly eight data points, easily divisible by four, and blanks to fill in - that the kids were started in no time. In a matter of seconds, they're grouped up, at the boards, rushing to get to be the one who gets to explain to the group what they can already plainly see.
At this point, several groups are telling me this is too easy. Confidence abounds. The magic is in the mild. 2. Thin-Slice Up To Medium: Bigger Data SetsMy next slice was indeed a thin-one: data sets with 12 or 16 data points instead of 8. Still divisible by 4, still blanks to fill in, and just the small twist that a quartile might include more than two of the data points. "You have to be kidding me," was the general response from the kids. "These aren't any harder than the mild ones!" The confidence spills over into the medium, and they rip through these in a couple of minutes, all thanks to the start they got on the almost-too-easy mild questions. The magic is in the mild. 3. Thin-slice Up To Spicy: Remove the BlanksFor the next thin-slice, I removed the blanks. Still data sets that are evenly divisible by four, but now you have to decide for yourself how many go in which blanks. Admittedly, another very thin slice, and not all that spicy. But who cares? Since I called them spicy, the momentum and confidence continue now that I'm doing supposedly spicy questions with ease. Some days, we really are into spicy territory by now, but today, these are still pretty mild, which is ok, because The magic is in the mild. 4. The struggle slice
But first, if we can all agree that
And did they ever! For the first problem (with 10 data points), some creative solutions they came up with included:
Conclusion"Thinking is what you do when you don't know what to do." It is why we build thinking classrooms to begin with. But it isn't easily won. The willingness to engage with mathematics - or anything else - that we don't know how to do takes some real nurturing. But once you've nurtured it, where it will take your students is absolutely incredible. So how do you nurture it? I'd love to say that it isn't magic, but it just might be. The magic is in the mild. Learning to think - truly think - during math class has bled into other thinking opportunities, like figuring out how to make a science demonstration work that I wasn't able to (left) without my even asking, or considering why there might be a single shoe on a fence post on our way to lunch (right). If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Want to read more right now? You're in luck - this is my 83rd post! You can browse past posts by category:
As an active participant in the Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics Facebook Community, I frequently see posts that can be summarized as: "I've transitioned to the Thinking Classrooms model, and it isn't working. What do I do? I usually don't respond to these posts because the answer is far too complicated to squeeze into a Facebook comment. There are a lot of possibilities, and without stepping into that teacher's classroom to see what's going on, it can be hard to know what say. Building A Thinking Classroom is indeed challenging. I've been chronicling my learning and my progress since August, and three of my earliest posts were titled "Into the Weeds," "Disaster Strikes," and "Struggling To Hold On." It was hard at the beginning. Frankly, it is still hard now. It is routinely and predictably successful now, but it still isn't easy. If it isn't working - and I mean full on, the whole thing feels like it isn't working - I can think of ten things to do about it. 1. Give It Time
In short, I've gotten very good at learning to change frequently, and to change big. One of the undeniable truths of major, framework-level change is that it takes time. It takes time for the kids to get used to new models of learning, and it takes time for the teacher to work the kinks out and make it his or her own. I don't even think about evaluating how a new teaching framework is going for six weeks. And that's six weeks of doing it all out, every single day. Full immersion. That's a bare minimum acclimation period. The workshop model took me over two years to finally get just right. Looking back at my Building Thinking Classrooms posts from the year, the one where I turned the corner from frequent chaos to frequent success came right at seven weeks into the school year. And that's coming from someone who is really comfortable with, experienced with, and frankly excited by major change. Building Your Thinking Classroom not going too well? You might just need to give it more time. 2. Implement the Practices One At A Time
This decision was the turning point of my year. Ever since backing off and then working on one practice at a time, things have been going really, really well. And I shouldn't be surprised! I've long advocated for assuring students are only focused on one thing at a time. Why shouldn't that apply to me, as well? Building your Thinking Classroom not going so well? You might consider backing off of some practices and working on them one at a time. 3. Craft Tasks CarefullyIn a Thinking Classroom, the boards and the collaboration get all the attention, but the quality of the thinking task is the real difference-maker. I learned really quickly that I can't just give my students any task that relates to the topic we're learning. Tasks have to be crafted very carefully - just the right entry point, just the right slicing, just the right content at just the right time in the unit... it's hard. Frequently, I'll see folks in the Facebook community ask "Does anybody have a good task on _______?" I'll be honest, I think this is a big mistake. I have not had success using other teachers' tasks. I have not had success with AI-written tasks. I need a task every day that meets JUST the right standard in JUST the right way for JUST the right students at JUST the right sequence in the broader unit of study. Picking a task off list or asking AI to make one isn't likely to meet that level of nuance very often. I'll give you a disasterous example from literally yesterday. I'm working with my students on finding the area of parallelograms. My specific state standards call for students to find the area of those figures by "decomposing them into rectangles and triangles." Even making my own thinking task, look how easy it was to cause a mess. Just about any parallelogram example from Google looks like this: As you can probably see, you wouldn't be able to find the area of this parallelogram by decomposing it into triangles and rectangles (at least not as a 6th grader), because after decomposing it as such, you wouldn't know the length of the base of the triangles. When it comes to thinking tasks, details like that matter... a lot.
4. Launch Tasks StrategicallyMuch of the Thinking Classrooms philosophy rests on the premise that, with the right task, the right sequencing, and the right thin-slicing, students can "figure out" the lion share of mathematics with just a series of hints and extensions from the teacher. As I said above, the task has to be just right for this to happen, which I have found to be true, but not sufficient. The task launch has to be just right, too, in order to get kids' foot in the door, so to speak. Most days, I can just get by with a "you can already... but what about...?" task launch. But some topics are harder to "figure out" than others. I've had to experiment with a couple of other task launch strategies as well, like doing minimal instruction to get their foot in the door and showing completed examples to get the ball rolling on hard-to-figure-out skills. One of my big Thinking Classrooms mantras is that "the magic is in the mild." If the mild questions are accessible enough for them to get started, the complexity can increase rapidly through collaboration, hints, and extensions. Carefully considering the task launch can go a long way toward making that happen. Building your Thinking Classroom not going so well? Consider launching tasks specifically and carefully. 5. Transfer OwnershipTransferring ownership of learning is relatively straight forward in a traditional, mimicking classroom. Most commonly, through some sort of gradual release series, ownership of content knowledge is passed from the teacher directly to individual students. If done well, that gradual release method is pretty reliable, and students are able to begin mimicking the new skill in a few minutes. In a thinking classroom, the transfer of ownership is not so tidy. Students develop their own understanding of a new skill or concept in their thinking groups first. This understanding is usually messy, imprecise, and often depends on the collective knowledge of the group. After a thinking task, students usually have some level of understanding and mastery, but a) it isn't equal among all students, b) it may only exist in the group, at the board, and all together, and c) different groups will have formed different understandings and strategies. Messy. The process of transferring that messy, collective understanding to a neat and tidy individual one can be tricky, but it is of vital importance that we make the effort to do so. Seeing students "at the boards" gets all the attention, but the work that happens afterwards is what seals the learning and transfers ownership of it to individual students. In some way shape or form, that process includes consolidation, meaningful note-making, check-your-understanding questions, and spiral reviewing. Consolidation is a challenge for everyone. I am constantly experimenting with new consolidation practices, sequences, and activities. In general, I find that making the effort to do it at all is more important than doing it perfectly. Right now, I most often include a short writing prompt, a look at our unit success criteria to see where the recently completed task falls in the broader topic of study, a set of questions for the students to classify by spiciness, and some direct instruction of vocabulary and conventions (see links for deeper explanations). Note-making, check your understanding questions, and spiral reviewing are more straight-forward.
6. Manage Memory
7. Manage BehaviorBuilding a Thinking Classroom in Mathematics brings with it so many incredible changes. The room looks different, work looks different, notes look different, teaching looks different, the kids are standing up, everybody is talking all the time - there are days I stop, look around, and hardly recognize what is happening as even counting as "school." Unfortunately, there's a big something that isn't different - there is still behavior to manage. A tight classroom and behavior management system is still a must. There's no getting around it. I've already written a piece about my thoughts on influencing student behavior. It isn't specific to a Thinking Classroom, but it still has my broad beliefs about how and why to do that effectively.
8. Manage AttentionLike behavior, managing attention post-pandemic is also much harder than it used to be. Building a Thinking Classroom does a lot of the legwork on attention management, but I still find myself doing a good bit of additional work on this on my own. During a task launch, I am laser focused on every student and their attention. In thinking groups, the kids need regular reminders of what their job is when they have the marker and when they don't. During consolidation, I'm making constant efforts to keep kids' attention where I need it. During note-making, I'm still hard at work making sure groups are on task.
9. Communicate the Reason Behind the PracticesWe are asking students to make a pretty big leap when they enter a Thinking Classroom. There are a whole host of things we ask them to do that aren't asked of them in any other class, and some of them are likely literally forbidden in other classes. Standing up is my favorite example. When I show other teachers video of my task launches, they usually can't even pay attention to what is happening because the sight of a group of kids standing clustered in the middle of the room stresses them out so much. "I never let the kids stand up," I usually hear. I get it! I had the same policy myself at one point (meanwhile, I've actually stared doing other parts of class standing and clustered because I like it so much!). Standing is also a point of contention with quite a few of my kids. They complain about "just sitting there" in their other classes, then complain to me about having to stand up so much.
10. Make sure it is all about thinkingMy biggest fear since becoming a member of the Building Thinking Classrooms Facebook community is that there are droves of teachers out there Building an At-The-Boards Classroom rather than a Thinking Classroom.
As Liljedahl always says, "thinking is what you do when you don't know what to do." A Thinking Classroom is supposed to be a room where, most of the time, kids are figuring out what to do because they don't know what to do. The boards are one of fourteen practices meant to generate thinking. They're not the star. They're a supporting role. There should be thinking before the boards. There should be thinking after the boards. We are Building Thinking Classrooms. Building your Thinking Classroom not going so well? Maybe your show has the wrong star. Boards or no boards, it's about thinking. What did I miss?It is my sincere hope that every teacher out there who wants to could experience the same success I have Building A Thinking Classroom. It is tough when I log into the community and see someone struggling, but I don't know how to help because I'm not there to see what's going wrong. This opus is my attempt to make suggestions based on what I've seen and experienced myself, but what about you? What are some other things a teacher struggling to Build A Thinking Classroom might need to consider? Leave a comment, share your wisdom, and be part of the conversation! If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Want to read more right now? You're in luck - this is my 81st post! You can browse past posts by category:
It was another strong week in my Thinking Classroom. Having had to think and figure things out for themselves every single school day for a full six months now, my students are able to cover huge amounts of content in a short amount of time. It was almost comical this week. They learned how to simplify variable expressions via combining like terms, applying the distributive property, and factoring in a class and a half. In my prior, mimicing classroom, that was a three or four day affair, and it still would have been shaky at the end. Both of these skills - combining like terms and moving between standard and factored forms of expressions - were not ones I expected students to be able to figure out organically. In the past, I've written about "introducing the minimum, then thin-slicing to the maximum" for topics where this is the case. That's what I ended up doing here, too, but not the same way I had before. In my first video demonstrating introducing the minimum, I was in front of the class showing how to approach thinking about the topic. This week, I tried showing them completed examples to think about during the task launch. For combining like terms, they saw a few un-simplified expressions pair with the simplified version. For distributing and factoring - which remarkably they were able to figure out in the same, shorter-than-usual class period (!) - I showed examples of the the same expressions in factored and standard form. It was remarkable, and it allowed them to dig right into the thin-slicing and run with it. I've got videos of each to share below. The first is just the task launch for combining like terms. This was the first of the two days I tried the task launch strategy. One of the things that made me fall in love with the new tactic is that, by the third example, you can hear how excited the kids are that they already that they see what's going on, and they literally can't wait to get into the first unfinished example before I even send them off. This second video is of the task launch for applying the distributive property and factoring. Similar enthusiasm - once they see it, they can't wait to get going. This video also includes a full recording of a single group working on the thinking task - mic-ed and all! These two were right next to the camera when I moved it and were nice enough to let me record them. This third one is the same as the second with a different class, but it also has our weekly rule review and some recall practice prior to the task launch. Feel free to skip to 13:45 you want to see the task launch, or 18:00 if you want to see the thinking group in action. All in all, I really liked the task launch tactic. There are certain times when, rather than "figuring something out," we need students to learn a particular mathematical convention or process, and it has to be the way it has to be. There are certain things that we can all solve our own way or have our own way of doing, but certain things have to be understood the way the broader mathematics community understands it. Knowing the vocabulary, conventions, and customs of math is part of belonging to that community. Here, I hope, is an approach to building that belonging but still maximizing thinking along the way. If you enjoyed this post, please share it! Want to read more right now? You're in luck - this is my 80th post! You can browse past posts by category:
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About MeI'm an award-winning teacher in the Atlanta area with experience teaching at every level from elementary school to college. Categories |