Building A Thinking Classroom: Struggling To Hang On

Another day in the journey of Building A Thinking Classroom In Mathematics, another struggle.

I finished out last week "in the weeds," so to speak.  ​I was able to get out of them, only for an even bigger struggle to follow.  

Much the same happened again.

I did a fairly extensive consolidation session (or at least my best attempt at one) to try and dig out of Wednesday's hole.  It didn't go great with my first class (my poor first class gets the dry run every day), but I was able to pivot after that and get things back on track decently with the other two classes.

I could live with the outcome, and I decided to devote the rest of class to a non-curricular thinking task. They loved it and did great with it, so at least we ended the day following the disaster feeling good about thinking.  

Today, however, we were back to a curricular thinking task, and while it wasn't the disaster that the last such task was, the groups for which it WAS a disaster particularly discouraged me.

For starters, I gave the wrong day's thinking task to the first class (again, poor first class!) and didn't realize it. They handled like champs and truly dug in and thought, but I didn't realize until well into the next class that I had done that.  While it was still on topic, it was the next day's more challenging extension of the intended day's skill.  Ugh.

Second, a handful of groups in each class tried SO hard to avoid thinking I could hardly believe it.  In the set up for the task where I reviewed prior learning, I made sure to point out that today's new situations were NOT extensions of the past few days (which had involved multiplication situations) - this was a new type of situation (division situations, though I didn't reveal that).  

They told me the understood and agreed with me.

And several groups proceeded to just go try to repeat the previous process mindlessly anyways.

That was problem number one.  I had to review with several groups that they had told me this was NOT the same type of situation we'd been working on ("fraction of another fraction" for the modeling-type thinkers, multiplication situations for the calculation type thinkers), and here they were either using those exact models or multiplying, producing an answer that was so obviously wrong even they could tell... but only if they stopped to think about their answer, which they hadn't (because they were avoiding thinking).

Problem number two was a repeat of one I had run into last Friday - some of the students already knew that these were division situations and already knew how to divide fractions.  There are two issues that arise when this happens:

• The kids who already know what to do don't need to think.  They already know what to do
• The kids who are working with them just "take their word for it" and let them do calculations that they don't understand, so they aren't thinking either.

I managed all that ok, I think.  But I didn't consolidate well (and I still don't have a reliable method for doing so), and I'm left feeling a LOT of uncertainty about the outcomes of this week:

• I think some kids are absolutely thriving.  They love the freedom of thinking and the depth of understanding they have rather than just memorizing algorithm after algorithm that they don't understand.
• I think some kids are craving those same algorithms.  They are used to being told what to do in math and that works for them.  There are, after all, kids who CAN learn unlimited algorithms and thrive in math classes in that way.
• I'm afraid that a lot of kids have not come up with a reliable way to handle the types of problems we worked on Monday-Thursday.
• I'm afraid that a lot of kids can't differentiate between Monday-Thursday's situations and the ones I introduced today.
• I'm afraid that I will lose the ability to manage that lots of kids understand these situations in lots of different ways.
• I'm afraid I can't tell who is who among all the bullet points above.
• I'm afraid that even once I assess who's who, I won't be able to manage the outcome.
• I'm afraid that some of these issues are arising because certain kids have been exposed to what we're learning already, while others are arising because I'm still learning how to manage a "Thinking Classroom," but that I don't know which problems are which.  Or if either will end in time.

It's an uncomfortable place to be for someone who is used to knowing what their students know and knowing what to do for the ones who don't.  I'm craving some reassurance, but I don't want to fall into old habits to get it.

Struggles aside, there are a few things to be proud of.  First, the kids are pretty happy to come to math class.  What I'm worrying about doesn't seem to be worrying them yet. 

Second, there are some kids who are really thriving by thinking.  I can already imaging them taking their standardized tests and approaching every question as a thinking question rather than applying "what type of problem is this and what algorithm goes with that type of problem" processes, and that's exciting to me (though admittedly, it is another thing that worries me, too, just because it is unfamiliar).

​Third, I can already see myself making strides towards thriving through responding to what's happening in the classroom rather than through planning to avoid issues in the first place.  While that feels uncomfortable (more problems), it is something I've wanted to work toward for years and haven't had the gumption to truly attempt.

​Hopefully those bright points will be enough to help me hold on.

Some days my baby Thinking Classroom really makes me smile.  Others, I have to fake it and convince myself to hold on.

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