The holidays marked the end of my first semester of Building A Thinking Classroom in Mathematics. Looking back through my list of posts from that time, it was mostly struggle for the first six weeks, then pretty smooth sailing for the next 12 weeks, with a lot of rapid learning on my part.
One of the things I've been dying to see over that time was whether or not all the obvious benefits of the Building Thinking Classroom practices would translate into the currency of our educational time - test scores. I teach in a very, very large school district, which means my students take standardized final exams in every subject at the end of each semester. These are tests that cover the standards the district prescribes for the first half of the year, and tests that I can't see ahead of time. They are pretty important for the kids and for me. The results are used, in part, to determine what math course opportunities the students get for the following year, they count as a decent chunk of their final grade, and they're analyzed heavily by my school and district leaders to evaluate how I'm doing as a teacher, too. So, did Building Thinking Classrooms deliver 'hard' results to support the 'soft' benefits visible in the classroom every day? It did. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, depending on how you look at it. Looking at the overall results and knowing very precisely how my students have typically done on these tests in the past, my best guess is that this group of students would have averaged a score in the low-80's if I had taught them the way I used to. I have a lot of data collected from a lot of years with a lot of groups of students, and I feel pretty confident this prediction. So how did they fare? They averaged a shade under 89%. Looking at it one way, that's a modest improvement of maybe 7-9 points in the average score. Looking at it another way, it's a massive improvement, nearly cutting in half the percent of the questions the students missed (from 20-ish% to only 10-ish%). Improving test scores isn't everyone's goal, I know. If you've spent any time in a Thinking Classroom, the portfolio of benefits is obvious. It transforms kids in ways that are impossible not to notice. But at least where I work, test scores talk, and I personally value them as evidence of the work I'm doing, too. Either way, the early results are in, and they're better! 
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About MeI'm an award-winning teacher in the Atlanta area with experience teaching at every level from elementary school to college. Categories
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