Building Thinking Classrooms

 

The Nuts and Bolts of Implementing “Thinking Classrooms” 

            In this Mind/Shift article, Kara Newhouse interviews Staci Durnin, a sixth-grade math teacher in Mineola, New York who read Peter Liljedahl’s book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics in the summer of 2023 and decided to try his approach after 29 years teaching with the conventional model. She loved the new approach and says that her students attained a much deeper understanding of mathematics than in previous years. Durnin reports that the transition involved a lot of work adapting lesson plans, but she got support from a 66,000-member Facebook group and it was all worth it. (Click the article link for an interview with Durnin and other teachers who implemented the approach during the 2023-24 school year.)

Newhouse’s article summarizes key elements of the “Thinking Classroom” approach. In 15 years of research, Liljedahl found that in the canonical I DO, YOU DO, WE DO math lesson, few students are thinking; rather, they’re mimicking the teacher. This is a problem, he says, because “if students are not thinking, they’re not learning.” Most of the so-called problem-solving in math classes, he believes, hasn’t been successful in getting students to think. “If we really want to have students learning through problem solving, then they have to get stuck, and they have to think, and they have to get unstuck.” 

Here’s how a Thinking Classroom lesson addresses this perennial problem of low intellectual engagement in math classes, often accompanied by I’m not a math person beliefs among many students:

-   The teacher gives a 3-5-minute introduction reviewing key background knowledge.

-   Students are randomly assigned to groups (two students per group in the primary grades, three in grade 3 and above).

-   Students see the random selection process in action, which makes them more likely to participate actively in their group and get to know all their classmates. 

-   All groups work on the same challenging problem standing up at erasable whiteboards.

-   Each group has one marker, and when a student has an idea, another student in the group writes it on the whiteboard.

-   The teacher circulates observing students’ progress, asking questions, providing vocabulary, giving hints and prods, and differentiating appropriately.

-   Students are encouraged to look at the strategies used by other groups, sometimes taking a “gallery walk” around the classroom.

-   The class convenes to consolidate key learnings, with the teacher drawing attention to successful solutions and common errors on the boards, providing more-direct instruction, and giving the bigger picture. 

-   Meaning-making during group work is messy, says Liljedahl, but it’s pulled together and made neater in this whole-group discussion.

-   Students write key insights in notebooks for their “future forgetful selves.”

-   Students then get up and, in different groups, move around the room solving shorter problems that check for understanding at the “mild,” “medium,” or “spicy” level of difficulty.

-   Each day’s problem gets a little harder, moving in “thin slices” through the curriculum. 

Liljedahl has found that most students need several lessons of less serious math problems to warm up to the new format before launching into the regular curriculum. “What that does,” he says, “is it makes math fun, and it makes math feel achievable and enjoyable. And it can be very disarming for students.” 

Collaboration within groups is a key success factor in Thinking Classrooms, he says: “What we noticed was that real collaboration doesn’t actually begin until students care as much about their partners’ learning as their own learning. And when empathy is unlocked, so many things work better in a classroom.” 

 

“How to Get Kids Thinking Instead of Mimicking in Math Class” by Kara Newhouse in Mind/Shift, August 27, 2024; see Memo 1013 for examples of Thinking Classroom problems at the elementary, middle-school, and high-school level, and Memo 992 for a summary of the first three chapters of Liljedahl’s book.