Building A Thinking Classroom: (Hopefully) A breakthrough Day

Last week was the seventh of the new school year, and thus also the seventh in my quest to transform my math classroom into a Thinking Classroom.  As I've been sharing, there have been some incredible successes so far - the first non-curricular task, the second non-curricular task, the kids really do think, and the kids are starting to listen to each other.  

There have also, however, been some real challenges, leading to a point where I was struggling to hold on a few weeks back.

In response, I did some studying, reaching the decision that I needed to stop doing certain practices that Liljedahl recommends implementing later until I had some earlier practices in better shape.  

The way that manifested is that, for the next week, I used non-curricular thinking tasks and taught new content traditionally.  During the thinking tasks, I focused on my current goals of giving tasks standing and verbally, focusing on the types of questions I would and wouldn't answer, and mobilizing knowledge.  ​

That decision, I think, was a good one.  I sacrificed having a "complete" Thinking Classroom for the time being with the goal of having a better one later, and I was able to do so without shutting down the whole operation.

I'm comfortable calling it a win.

Last Monday, I felt ready to return to a curricular thinking task and to dip my toes back into the first practice in set three: using hints and extensions to maintain flow.

After a week of shoring up the practices in set two, I felt ready to dip my toes back into set three.

I already felt pretty good about this practice from prior experience.  I'm comfortable creating "thin-sliced" curricular thinking tasks that do a lot of the leg-work of keeping kids in the "flow zone," and I'd really still been doing this out of habit on the non-curricular tasks of the past week anyhow.

So back to a curricular thinking task we went on Monday.

And it went great.

As you can see in the video below, I got over 30 minutes of pretty darn solid thinking.  I don't recommend watching the entire video unless you love watching kids work on thinking tasks, but the takeaway for me was just what I said - 30 minutes of sustained engagement - on a Monday morning - on a fairly bland curricular thinking task​.  

Not.  bad.

And I have even better news!

In my other two classes, the experience was the same, but there was a cherry on top of the sustained-engagement sundae.  When I rang the bell to stop, 8-10 kids in each of those classes could be heard saying:

"NNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

All, as I said, after 30+ minutes on a fairly bland non-curricular task on a Monday.

Flow state achieved.

And maybe - hopefully - a sign of a breakthrough moving forward.

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Want to read more right now?  You're in luck - this is my 68th post! You can browse past posts by category:

• ​Building A Thinking Classroom
• Leaning Into The Science and Engineering Practices
• Classroom Practices
• Classroom Stories
• Ideas and Opinions
• Pandemic-Related Issues​