Introduction

Before I start this journey, I implore you to read the book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl.

Owning a personal copy is highly recommended, as you are going to want to highlight the heck out of it. I will do my best to briefly summarize what is written, but this is not intended to be any kind of substitute for the knowledge in this book. The intention of this project is to share my personal understanding and attempts to implement the 14 practices included in the text; what went well, what didn’t, and what I haven’t even tried yet. I am not an expert, nor am I pretending to be one. While I have taught middle school math for 19 years, I have spent only one school year trying to implement these strategies in my own classroom. The main goal is to share my knowledge and experience to help others learn, as well as process how my own year went in a more structured way.

Each chapter of the book has a similar layout that presents some kind of issue, the problem that issue creates, and teaching strategies his research has shown move students towards a thinking classroom mindset. Each chapter ends with an FAQ section that addresses many of the anticipated questions teachers will have about these strategies, and what the research showed can address those concerns. Finally, many chapters end with samples of “rich thinking tasks” teachers can use in their classroom, often in three grade types (elementary, middle, high).

How I Understand This Chapter:

After telling the story of trying to help a colleague implement rigorous problem solving in their classroom and failing, Liljedahl was inspired to learn more about what made students think, and what made them simply “do”. After years of observation in many different classrooms, Liljedahl found that students were adept at “studenting”, while lacking in actual thinking. Studenting, as coined by Gary Fenstermacher in 1986, basically means everything students need to do to survive in a school setting, both small and large. This could be as simple as taking notes during class, or as complex as doing an in-depth gradebook analysis to figure out the minimum amount of work needed to achieve a certain grade. By middle school, children have become experts on how to be students. This does not mean they have learned how to think. A child can earn an A in a class by being a great student but not really have mastery of the Learning Targets in the course.

Liljedahl breaks down the most common student behaviors he observed as the following:

Slacking: Not attempting the task and filling time with non-school related behavior.
Stalling: Not attempting the task and filling time with school adjacent behaviors.
Faking: Pretending to do a task by faking task related behaviors.
Mimicking: Doing exactly what the teacher did in the example, no matter what the task required.
Trying It On Their Own: Attempting the task in earnest, whether getting it correct or not.

When teachers did a common type of directed lesson (I do, we do, you do), their research showed the following student behavior:

These results prompted Liljedahl to investigate what kinds of school structures and routines were common that may be encouraging students to perform “studenting” rather than thinking, and to come up with ways to disrupt that trend. Through years of research, testing various ways of running math classrooms, he found 14 practices that had a significant impact on student thinking and learning. Each of the practices is explained in the 14 chapters of the book.

Impactful Quotes (To Me):

“In essence, studenting is what students do in a learning setting – some of which is learning. And much of which is not.” (pg 7)

This just makes me wonder how much of the time in my classroom has been spent “doing school” rather than thinking. Over 19 years, I bet it is quite a large number. Sigh.

“In a typical one-hour lesson, 75%-85% of the students exhibited non-thinking behaviors for 100% of the time. The rest of the students exhibited non-thinking behaviors for all but 8-12 minutes of the time.” (pg 11)

When I read this quote my brain knew that it was true, but my heart did not want to believe it. When I think back to all of the directed lessons I have done in my career, how many students were just mimicking, stalling, slacking, or faking? In his example above, let’s assume a class of 32 students is being taught a directed lesson. 32 students at one hour each represents 1,920 minutes of possible thinking time. Let’s be generous and say that 25% of the students have 12 minutes of thinking time. That means, best case scenario, that 96 minutes out of 1,920 were used for thinking during that hour. Honestly, that’s just depressing. When I read this quote I knew I had to change much of what I was doing in my classroom.

Reflection:

I remember reading this introduction chapter three times before moving on, just blown away by the information. Just the idea that so much time is wasted by students doing learned studenting behaviors that actively prevent them from thinking, all while many of them believe they are doing what they are supposed to do, created anxiety within me.

So much wasted time.

I don’t teach math to create adults who can copy/paste. I want the next generation to be better thinkers than this one. I fear that decades of ineffective instruction, social media addiction, and a culture of instant gratification are all working against this goal on a daily basis. The task seems insurmountable. Yet, if students are never given the chance to think and problem solve, how will they ever learn how much they can really do?

Next up: Chapter 1: The Tasks We Use in Class