The Rise And Fall of Building Thinking Classrooms In Mathematics

​June 1, 2031

Eight years ago, in 2023, my governor and state school superintendent proudly proclaimed that they had "eliminated the final remnants of the Common Core from Georgia."  

For a good ten years, the Common Core was the initiative in education. For a decade of my career, most of my professional development time was spent learning to understand the Common Core deeply and to learn how to lead students to higher levels of understanding through those standards.

Ten or so years later, it was the goal of my state government to "eliminate every trace" of it.

Not improve it.  Not refine it. Not even merely move on to the next, bigger thing.

​"Eliminate every trace."

The very next year, in 2024, my curriculum assistant principal came to a planning meeting and told us "we no longer use reading or writing workshop.  No one even speaks Lucy Calkins' name in this district anymore.  Got it?"

This, of course, came on the heels of a near-decade where we - like thousands of districts nation-wide -  had spent an astronomical sum of money buying, rolling out, and training everyone on teaching reading and writing using this methodology and these materials. 

I was twenty years into my career at that time, and this point became clear: initiatives and innovations don't just end anymore. We don't just move onto the next promising idea.  We "eliminate every trace" that we ever committed to it in the first place.  

At that same point in time, I was fully invested in the next, big, "new thing" in math education - Building Thinking Classrooms In Mathematics. 

And in the midst of the fall of the two biggest initiatives of my career, I should have seen its similar demise coming.

But I didn't.  Like the Common Core and the Reading/Writing Workshop Model, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics  ̶w̶a̶s̶ is extremely well reasoned, it addressed a specific failing of the existing instructional philosophy of the time, and it was developed with the sincere hope that it would drastically improve both the learning and the experience of students. 

It was getting traction all over the world in 2023 and 2024 when I was getting started with it.  My students did extraordinarily with it in my very first year, both in terms of achievement and of their classroom experience.  

​It felt - as innovations always do -  like the start of a genuine revolution.

And here we are in 2031, and it's just another initiative we are no longer even allowed to speak of.

How did something (else) so promising and with so much early success end up in the scrapheap of failed educational ideas just a handful of years later?

I can tell you exactly how.

It ended up there the same way everything ends up there.

It followed a predictable pattern that I've now seen dozens of times in my 29 years as an educator.

A pattern I've affectionately named, The Rise And Fall of Anything New.

The Rise And Fall of ANything New

The Rise and Fall of Anything New, I have found, takes about ten years.  Georgia "fully implemented" the Common Core in 2014, and then "eliminated every trace" of it in 2024.  The Lucy Calkins' Units of Study program had a longer run, but only in New York City.  It's run of national prominence was also about 10 years.  Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics was published in 2021, and like clockwork, here we are at its funeral in 2031.

The Rise and Fall of Anything New also follows ten predictable steps. 

Ten years, ten steps. 

​Beautifully parsimonious.

Here they are.
​

1. In a Time of Cultural or Economic struggle, we decide to acknowledge that 'normal' isn't working in our schools

Only in times of strife or struggle do we, as Americans, seem willing to acknowledge that our efforts to educate our children aren't working.  The Common Core were born during the Great Financial Crisis, No Child Left Behind was signed into Law shortly after the September 11th attacks and while the US economy was still reeling from the dot-com bust.  The "Science of Reading" had its big proliferation around the time of the Covid-19 epidemic.

All of them were times we actually faced the fact that only about 1/3 of US kids are "proficient" in reading or in math for their age, and we're pretty much stuck there. 

Most of the time, we don't worry about this or advertise how badly it's going.  Despite these numbers, we have an 87% graduation rate, so we've effectively decoupled graduation and education.

However, as I said, there are fleeting moments of crisis when we decide these numbers aren't good enough and that we should do something about it.  The Rise and Fall of Anything New starts here - in those preciously rare moments where we admit that we need​ something new.
​

Percentage of 4th graders proficient in reading.
​

Percentage of 8th graders proficient in math.

Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, of course, was not developed in or for the United States.  It was, however, published at the perfect time - in 2021 when we were in the midst of the Covid-induced achievement free fall in American schools.  It was a rare time when we were, indeed, willing to face the dragon.
​

2. A person or Organization offers a well-reasoned Solution

The Common Core were developed with the well-reasoned idea that students needed to learn to read more than just literature and that math had concepts to understand in addition to algorithms to be performed.  Lucy Calkins developed her Units of Study because there is much more to learn about reading than merely phonics and much more to learn about writing than merely mechanics.  Peter Liljedahl developed Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics with the bold idea that students should be active thinkers rather than passive mimics in their math classes.  There are many brilliant minds in education.  In those rare moments when we are willing to admit that we need something new, there are great minds out there ready to answer that call.
​

It starts with a good idea.  In the 2010's, the Common Core gave us the radical idea that kids could understand math instead of just doing math.  Spoiler alert: we "eliminated every trace" of such madness in Georgia 10 years later.

3. The Innovation Experiences Local Success

Like any innovation that catches on, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics needed initial evidence that it could move the needle.  That data is reflected in the book, and Liljedahl was transparent with how the practices were developed and modified as they were studied.  The practices and the broader philosophy were obviously successful within the classrooms that Liljedahl was able to partner with.

Similarly, Lucy Calkins' Units of Study were initially implemented in New York City with positive results - from what I can tell, after implementation in 2003, reading proficiency rates in New York City Public Schools increased every single year of its implementation there from 2006 to 2023. ​

New York City Public Schools' reading proficiency rates from 2006-2023.

4. Innovators Elsewhere Choose to Join In and Experience Similar Success

Once word of the local success got out when Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics got out with the publication of the book in 2021, motivated teachers like me wanted in on that success and chose to implement the program in their own classrooms.

The key word in that sentence when it comes to The Rise and Fall of Anything New is chose. 

In Diffusion of Innovation Theory, innovators are the professionals who:
​ 

"are eager to try new ideas, to the point where their venturesomeness almost becomes an obsession. Innovators’ interest in new ideas leads them out of a local circle of peers and into social relationships more cosmopolite than normal.  Usually, innovators have substantial financial resources, and the ability to understand and apply complex technical knowledge.  While others may consider the innovator to be rash or daring, it is the hazardous risk-taking that is of salient value to this type of individual.  The innovator is also willing to accept the occasional setback when new ideas prove unsuccessful."

Innovative teachers tend to be highly effective, comfortable with - and even excited by - change, and able to learn and succeed on their own.  As such, they are able to take programs that have proven successful elsewhere and implement them well in their own context.  Teachers like this were finding success Building their own Thinking Classrooms from 2021-2025 after the publication of the book.  

​We read it, we saw the wisdom in it, and we made it happen.
​

In 2025, my Thinking Classroom in Mathematics was going so well that I started doing some thinking tasks in science, too!

Isolated success stories popped up in classrooms across the world at this time.  Personally, I started in 2023 after a disastrous prior year, and saw incredible results in the very first year.
​

5. Forced Mass Adoption

Once word gets out that something new is working, the people in charge start to want in on the party.  If it's working, everybody should do it!

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming.  Everybody in my district had to move to the Common Core in 2013.  Everybody in my school had to move to the Lucy Caulkins Units of Study in 2016 (and the whole district wasn't far behind). 

In 2023, "task-based" lessons started to be featured and highlighted in my district's resources, and pictures of students working on them at whiteboards started to circulate. In 2024, I started to see the first few teachers who indicated that their entire department, or grade level, or school was being forced to move to Building Thinking Classrooms.  

By the start of the 2026-2027 school year, it proliferated.  This now has evidence that it works, so everybody in our department/school/district/state needs to be doing this.  
​​

A photo of students participating in a district-wide initiative in 2026.

I call this whole sequence of events The Rise And Fall of Anything New. 

This is the climax.

The top.

The end of the rise.

The start of the fall.

It isn't a philosophy, or a framework, or a success story, or an innovation anymore.

Now, it's an initiative.
​

6. Poor Implementation

In steps 1-4 of The Rise and Fall of Anything New, an innovation is being implemented by people who choose it - people who see in the innovation a specific way to address a specific problem that they are tired of tolerating.

For me, it was results.  I implemented Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics once I became determined that I'd never be able to get kids learning at the rate I was used to again after the Covid epidemic.  In 2022-23, I had wonderful kids, I taught them extremely well in the way I always had, and they did awful when testing season rolled around.  I wanted better results, so I decided to Build a Thinking Classroom to get them.

There were other reasons to choose it, though.  Engagement, culture, even, ironically, the Common Core (they had a brief overlap before the Common Core was outlawed) - invested teachers all over the world were Building Thinking Classrooms with wide-ranging, noble goals.

The lesson that never seems to get learned is that people who choose instructional solutions are much more likely to implement them with fidelity than people who are forced to adopt them unwillingly.  

I had just seen it in the Lucy Calkins downfall.  The teachers I knew who "opted in" to using her Units of Study got incredible results and genuinely transformed the reading and writing experiences of their students.  They bought into all the little details of it, learned to do it as it was intended to be done, meticulously mastered the philosophy, and changed lives in the process.  The teachers who were forced to implement it after the initial choosers had so much success never did any of that.  They took it out of the box, learned none of the craft, and simply complied with the order to do it.

And it failed spectacularly.

Fast forward to 2026 and 2027, as teachers everywhere were being forced to Build Thinking Classrooms because it worked so well for the early adopters, and we got the same disaster.  The teachers who wanted no part of the innovation simply stopped teaching directly, sent kids to whiteboards, and figured that would do it.  That's all it ever looked like to the leaders who saw it working, so they bought them the books and told them that was what they needed to do.

​Again, they complied.
​

7. Poor Outcomes from Forced Adoption

New instructional models, philosophies, and frameworks only work when they're implemented with fidelity.  Huge swaths of math teachers never embraced the idea that math concepts could be taught in addition to algorithms, never taught that way, and so - of course - the Common Core never delivered on its promises in those classrooms.  Huge swaths of literacy teachers read lesson frameworks verbatim, sent their kids off to read and write aimlessly in "workshops," and stopped teaching phonics entirely, and - of course - their students' ability to read and write fell off a cliff.

Math teachers who wanted no part of a Thinking Classroom, but who had no choice, did the basic, visible things most associated with them, never committed to most of the practices, and - of course - their kids stopped learning.

Nobody ever promises that you can just sort of pretend to do something and get results.

The blame here isn't on the teachers - they didn't choose this.

What we never seem to learn is that you can't force people into believing in something.  It'll never be as simple as "teacher A is getting results with program B, so everybody needs to start doing program B."  Program B isn't getting results on its own.  Teacher A, who believes in Program B, believes he or she can be successful with it, and who is willing to put the time and effort into doing it right, is getting results with Program B.  Complying in name only won't get it done.
​

8. Hit Pieces

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic - easily the greatest threat to students' education in my lifetime - NPR seized the moment.  The found examples of teachers who had poorly implemented the Lucy Calkins Units of Study, (on Zoom, no less), were getting the predictably poor results, and they sold us a story (a podcast series called Sold A Story). They sold us a story that teaching reading meant only teaching phonics, they found a few teachers who taught no phonics in a few Zoom lessons, and they told us "your children aren't being taught to read." 

Bad implementation means bad results, and bad results mean that the critics are coming.  Hit pieces and podcast series are around the corner.

Failure sells.

No matter the decades of success in New York City nor the years of success the teachers who chose Ms. Calkins philosophy had, NPR told us "your children aren't being taught to read anymore."
​

The light was shone on forced, mass, poor implementation, and that was it.

In 2029, they came for our Thinking Classrooms.

"Your child's math teacher has stopped teaching them math."

​"They're just being told to 'figure it out.'"  

"It's all about boards, and the boards aren't working."
​

In 2029, the podcasters came for our Thinking Classrooms.

Who was profiled in the newest season of Sold A Story?  Was it the teachers Liljedahl worked with personally who had local success?  Was it the early adopters who chose the philosophy and who had years of thriving students and data to prove it?

Of course not.

It was the teachers it was forced on, who never wanted it anyways.

"My administrators just say don't teach them anything and send them to these boards to figure it out for themselves.  I don't even get it, but it is what I'm expected to do."  That was the line from the podcast series that sealed it.

Forget that there are fourteen practices to Building A Thinking Classroom, and that nobody profiled in the series implemented more than one or two.  Hit pieces are just like the persuasive essay we learned to write in school - you support your claim using the evidence that you can find, and you leave out the evidence against it.

And they did.

And it worked.

​Again.

​Predictably, many of the practices in Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics were conveniently not profiled in the hit pieces.

​9. Uproar to OUtlaw

In The Rise And Fall of Anything New, the uproar year is the one that actually deserves a documentary.

It is quite a scene.

People are screaming at school board meetings.  Entire school boards turn over.  People get fired.

In schools, that's where you hear things like the "nobody in this district even speaks Lucy Calkins name, got it?" line I told you about earlier.

In 2030, it was the same story in my district when it came to Building Thinking Classrooms.  Whiteboards were removed from all the classrooms.  Assigned seats were mandated.  With no replacement framework to move on to, it was a year of CYA.  "Here are some PowerPoints.  Follow them precisely.  Just teach them the damn math and NO GROUP WORK PERIOD," my assistant principal told us during pre-planning.
​
Parents were trying to "catch us" having kids think (gasp!) left and right.  Complaints were everywhere.
​

With thinking and collaboration outlawed in 2030, we were forced to get creative.

Had I not been one year from retirement at that point, I wouldn't have made it.

The uproar worked. 

It always works.

The "eliminated all trace" rhetoric came back.  Thinking Classrooms were outlawed.  The kids had already been doing horribly since the forced mass adoption.  They did even worse in 2030.  And whenever test scores free fall, you know step 10 is just around the corner.
​

10. Back To Basics

This is where it always ends.   The Rise and Fall of Anything New starts​ with a once-in-a-generation willingness to admit that what we're doing isn't working for kids.  The Rise and Fall of Anything New ends with the opposite - romanticizing how "back in the day," when we just taught the basics in a straight forward way, everybody was doing great.

Which, of course, they weren't.

But back to basics is always the final move.

I'm just a few days from retiring at this point.  With thinking outlawed in math classes, the last year of my career has resembled my first - pencils, papers, notes, rows, worksheets.

Back to basics.

Just like the good old days.

Also, just like the good old days, about 1/3 of my students are on track for proficiency this year.  A far cry from the 70-90% when I had Built A Thinking Classroom.  But at least they haven't been doing any of that awful thinking we used to make them do.

After all, 1/3 ain't bad.

At least not until the next crisis.

When we do this all over again.

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 99th 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

Want to contribute to the conversation?  Or do you have an idea for a future post?  Leave a comment below!