Reflections on my First "Thinking Unit"

I'm close to a month into this school year - a school year in which I've aspired to be my first with a full-on Thinking Classroom - and I've more or less wrapped up the first "unit" of content.

I'm accustomed to being able to read about new teaching strategies and being able to more or less get them up and running on my own pretty reliably.  But as I've written, after a good start with the firstand second non-curricular tasks, the curricular tasks got me into the weeds, then into disaster territory, and then to a point where I was struggling to hang on.

That said, with some time to recover and reflect, I think there is plenty of good and plenty of potential to reflect on as well.  With no further ado, here is the good, the bad, the ugly, of my first attempt at a Thinking Classrooms unit:

• First and foremost, the kids think.  There is no doubt that, when the kids are at the whiteboards, most of them are thinking most of the time.  I hear incredibly productive and valuable mathematical thinking and discussion every class period, every day.  While I admittedly worry about some of the things are not happening as I try to get this off the ground (more on that later), there can be no doubt that if getting kids to think is a worthy goal, that goal is being met.

First and foremost, I can say that, if getting the kids to think is a worthy goal, that goal is being met.
​

• At least for the time being, the kids largely enjoy the Thinking Classroom experience.  As I make my "how are things going?" phone calls to parents, they're overwhelmingly telling me that their kids look forward to math class every day (though admittedly, a lot are telling me that math has always been their student's favorite class).  The feeling in the room is really positive every day.

The kids mostly seem to enjoy the thinking tasks.
​

• I think (<--read, *hope*) that part of the early struggles with the curricular tasks has to do with the fact that the first topic on the calendar this year is *always* a struggle, even in a mimicking classroom.  Worse yet, the change in Georgia's math standards this year added a huge, extra layer of complexity to it.
  • What I'm saying is, from a "get comfortable with a new way running my class" standpoint, I may have chosen the worst possible unit to get started with.  The struggles I've had might have happened without the effort to move to a Thinking Classroom model, and might have been even worse.
• As I've reported here and here, one of the big, unforeseen challenges with starting the Thinking Classrooms experiment with this particular unit is that about 1/4 of the kids already knew how to do the math. As a result...
  • Those kids largely didn't need to think, and were extremely resistant to thinking when they didn't need to (understandable).
  • Those kids considered "showing the other kids the algorithm to memorize" to be thinking, which it was not, for anyone involved.  (Understandable, but challenging).
• The kids are increasingly better at listening to each other and at not expecting all the ideas and information and answers to come from me.  This is true both during the thinking tasks and in other class activities that involve collaboration.

• I did a big study session with the Thinking Classrooms book this weekend, and I got some great ideas for moving forward.  More on this in the next post.
• If I had it to do over again, I have a long list of things I would do differently in this past unit, but "throwing out" or delaying the use of curricular thinking tasks isn't on that list.  That, I think, is the best sign that most of the struggles I experienced were a result of my execution of the Thinking Classrooms model and not as a result of the model itself.

​That's a look back at my reflections on the first "unit" of content I tried under a full-fledged Thinking Classrooms setup.  With that look back out of the way, it is time to focus forward, which I'll do in my next post.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it!

Want to make sure you never miss a new post?  Subscribe below for email notifications of new content.

Want to read more right now?  You're in luck - this is my 66th 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​