Building A Thinking Classroom In Mathematics - Full Class REcording

​One of the most common requests I see in the Building Thinking Classrooms community is some version of:
​

             "I read the book and I love the idea, but I need to see it in action.  Is anybody in my area doing this?"

If you live in - or ever visit - the Atlanta area, hit me up!  You can come and observe any time!

In the mean time, however, I wanted to provide something I haven't seen elsewhere - a full class recording on a typical day in my Thinking Classroom.  I've seen lots of clips - almost always of kids at boards doing thinking tasks, but never a full class.

So, if that would help you visualize it, here you go!

A few details:

• I teach 6th grade 'standard' math.
• In lieu of participating in any sort of school-wide, separate CQI or intervention time, I have very long class periods where I do that kind of work with every class period separately.  The first chunk of the video you'll see is review time, then I devote a fairly normal class period's worth of time to new content, BTC-style.
• The class you will see is fairly small (20-ish) because of...
  • some of the standard reasons a class might be scheduled intentionally smaller
  • poor attendance
• This is an extraordinarily typical class day.  I didn't choose it for any reason other than that I thought to turn the camera on.  This is how a day goes with this particular class.

This first short video is not from the same day or from the same group of kids, but it shows how I assign the visibly random groups.
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Here's the full class recording

• 0:00 - 23:45 - Kids are individually doing recall practice, then discussing them with a partner, then reviewing with me (CQI/intervention)
• 23:45 - 27:15 - Task Launch 
• 27:15 - 49:45 - "Thin-Sliced" Curricular Thinking Task
• 49:15 - 1:07:55 - Consolidation 
• 1:07:55 - end - Note-making and Check Your Understanding

If you'd like to see more or see a group recorded up-closed and mic-ed, you can see such recordings in this post on launching "hard-to-figure-out" tasks.

​Building A Thinking Classroom is hard - but incredibly valuable - work.  Thanks for building yours, and I hope this video of mine helps!

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