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KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 62: Building Thinking Classrooms. A Conversation with Peter Liljedahl.
Engaging students in meaningful thinking and learning is essential for effective education. We explore the principles of creating a thinking classroom with Dr. Peter Liljeddahl, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, purposeful tasks, and a supportive learning environment.
What we'll cover...
- Discussion of non-thinking behaviors observed in traditional classrooms
- Introduction to the 14 key practices for building thinking classrooms
- Importance of random group formations for collaborative learning
- Strategies for implementing thinking tasks into classroom routines
- The role of teacher-student dynamics in fostering engagement
- Emphasis on valuing mistakes as learning opportunities
- How to incorporate playful and non-curricular tasks into learning
- Insights into Dr. Liljedahl's further resources and books
If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe for more insights on transforming education through innovative practices!
About our guest...
Dr. Peter Liljedahl is a Professor of Mathematics Education in the Faculty of Education and an associate member in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Liljedahl has authored or co-authored 9 books, 26 book chapters, 27 journal articles, and over 50 conference papers.
His research interests are creativity, insight, and discovery in mathematics teaching and learning and teacher development. He consults regularly with schools, school districts, and ministries of education on issues of teaching and learning, assessment, and numeracy.
Connect with Peter...
Building Thinking Classrooms - the book!
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About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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I've been working on a project that I call Building Thinking Classrooms, which is a really close look at what are the things we have to do in the classroom to change the environment so that it becomes more conducive to getting students to think, on the principle that thinking is a necessary precursor to learning.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindled podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling, the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 3:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. Katie, how do you feel about thinking I?
Speaker 2:feel great about it a lot when you're learning well, yeah, I try, I certainly try. I won't say that I'm some fancy thinker or anything, but yeah, try. How do you feel about it?
Speaker 3:I feel like there's a lot of times just throughout the day, I don't know where my keys are, I don't know where my phone is, I don't know. And I'm like, how am I even like getting through the day, because or I'm trying to like work on a task and I'm like learning something, but I'm not thinking about it and I realized and we're going to get into this in today's conversation is a lot of. It is how I was educated as a child. I was, so I was what Peter will tell us and I opened the conversation with this is mimicking. A teacher would teach me something and then I would just mimic her behaviors and wasn't really thinking to learn. And I'm wondering if that is related to me leaving my keys and my phone and stuff all around the house. Maybe not. Maybe that's just my gut function.
Speaker 2:That's funny, yeah. Well, there's lots of like spots in your life where you can just kind of turn your brain off and like autopilot it. And funny, funny story. The other day I was driving one of our one of my son's friends home and we just moved, so I was driving him to his house but I was driving close to our old house and so I started automatically just driving to my old house and he was like, where are we going?
Speaker 2:And I was like, oh sorry, I was on autopilot for a minute, like I'm driving a car, right, like doing something very serious, and I'm like we, your brain can get to do a very complicated thing without actually thinking much. And I said, oh sorry, I'm on autopilot and I'm just like, you know, like, as, like a figure of speech, like my brain was on autopilot. Obviously humans don't actually have a mechanism like a spaceship where you can put it on autopilot. And then he was just quiet for a minute. And then he he said quietly, does your minivan have autopilot? Like as if it was like that's an actual thing in cars now. So I'm like, oh no, that's just a figure of speech, but you would never have asked that in the nineties, uh it was just really funny.
Speaker 3:I was so excited to dive into learning how to really get kids thinking in school.
Speaker 2:Yes, totally so. Today we're going to talk to Dr Peter Lilliodahl Lilliodahl, his last name is Swedish, so I'm practicing. He is the author of a book called Building Thinking Classrooms and he's a professor of mathematics education in the Faculty of Education and an associate member of the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, canada. He has co-authored over nine books, 26 book chapters, 27 journal articles and over 50 conference papers. So this guy really knows his stuff. I'm so excited to learn from him. His research interests are creativity, insight and discovery in mathematics, teaching and learning, as well as teacher development. He consults regularly with schools, school districts and ministries of education on issues of teaching and learning, assessment and numeracy. Let's talk to Peter.
Speaker 3:Hi, peter, I am so excited to talk to you today on the Kindled podcast. Welcome.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I absolutely love your book. I have all my tabs and all my post-its, and I'm not even a teacher. I'm just so excited to get this book into other teachers' hands. And so can you just tell us a little bit about your background? Who are you, what is the work that you do and what is your big? Why in the world?
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Well, I'm a professor of math education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. I've been there for 20 years. Prior to that, I was a high school math, physics and English composition teacher. I do research on a whole variety of things. My interests have been for the last 20 years around creativity in mathematics.
Speaker 1:Student and teacher affect. What are their emotions, beliefs, attitudes within the doing and learning of mathematics and the teaching of mathematics. But for the last 15 years or last 20 years, I guess it is now I've been working on a project that I call Building Thinking Classrooms, which is a really close look at what are the things we have to do in the classroom to change the environment so that it becomes more conducive to getting students to think, on the principle that thinking is a necessary precursor to learn. Yes, so that's kind of who I am and what I do. My big why, my big why for a very long time and it's becoming, even of late, more and more clear is how is it that what we do as a teacher affects how students experience learning? And it turns out that almost everything we do as a teacher affects the way students experience learning good or bad and it's becoming increasingly clear that this is a very sensitive and timely issue for education.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It was really life, or it was eye opening for me right out of the gate in your book about how I learned and how I was taught in school, and I was like I just mimicked. This is why thinking sometime is really uncomfortable for me, because I have developed this habit of mimicking. And okay, especially in math, because I would say that I'm not a math person or I'm not good at math. And why is that? Because I got A's on all my tests and trigonometry. I could memorize all of the formulas and get an A, but did I do any thinking? No, I was just mimicking those behaviors. So it was really fascinating for me to go oh okay, this is why I struggle with learning sometimes or thinking, and so now I can make a change. Even though I'm 40 years old, I'm no longer a student in school, so thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's what's so interesting about what you said was that you don't consider yourself a math person. You got A's right, like there's a huge separation between performance and mathematics, which can be achieved through mimicking, as you have talked about, and what your relationships with mathematics is, and that's that sort of closer connection to the learning, the understanding and the emotional residue that it leaves inside of you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those like limiting beliefs that are getting laid down in the early days of education are so, so strong and so important. I have a recent memory where I was like I have the same perception of myself, like not a math person. I did not get all A's like Adrian, I was like a solid B plus kid. My sister she's 10 years older than me, she's student body present valedictorian never got to be in her life so I was like trying to live up to this uh, this example could never do it. Um, and I think I just kind of learned that I wasn't a math person and I think that I'm not an anything person is a really dangerous framing to start really early in your life. Right, you're closing a lot of doors to yourself when you believe that.
Speaker 2:And then this was last year I was at my brother's house and he bought the house that I grew up in. So all my old school stuff was in the boxes in the attic and he's like can you get all your stuff out of here? So I was going through all my old boxes and I found copies of my old standardized test scores like from the nineties, and I did good at, I did good in math. I was like I'm in like the 98th percentile for math. I was like I am a math person. This test score proves that I have been a math person this whole time, and I just didn't know that I was a math person.
Speaker 2:Um, so I just I just agree with the sentiment we're laying down here that it is really, really important to get to get these things right and to help kids to really to think about math and about all subjects right. We can, we can build thinking classrooms around math. We can do it around other things too. So take us through the core principles of building thinking classrooms. How does it differ from, like, a traditional classroom approach?
Speaker 1:So, building thinking classrooms is well. First of all, it's a reaction to this realization that students are not are spending a lot of time in their classrooms not thinking, and that resulted in, or that led into, a research project, that, where I looked at what are the things we need to do to get students to think, and I looked at 14 core sort of teaching routines. Right, um, these are things that every teacher does by and large, right, like we. We use tasks. Every teacher uses tasks. We got it. If we want students to think, we got to give them something to think about. Uh, we use collaborative groups. We get students working. Think we've got to give them something to think about. We use collaborative groups. We get students working somewhere. They're writing in their book or they're writing on something. We answer questions, we give homework, we have students write notes, we do formative and summative assessment. There's 14 core routines that every teacher does by and large. They do them in ways that converges on the institutionally normative routines that have been established in education for a century and a half, and what I did was I treated each of these sort of core routines as a variable, and what are the different ways we can enact each of these Like, for example, what are the different ways we can enact collaboration? Each of these like, for example, what are the different ways we can enact collaboration? How can we form groups? And I would just research all the varieties, variances and nuance and nuance and nuance. These, until what emerged, were a way to initiate this and enact this routine in such a way that it maximizes student thinking. So, building thinking classrooms is a collection of 14, let's call them optimal routines teaching practices that we can use in our classroom to increase student thinking, and some of the really core ones are we have to use thinking tasks.
Speaker 1:What is a thinking task? Well, a thinking task is anything that gets students to think, and it turns out that our existing resources are full of these types of tasks, right, like, pretty much every single task in your textbook is a thinking task, depending on when students encounter it and when they encounter it vis-a-vis your teaching of it. It and when they encounter it vis-a-vis your teaching of it, right so? And it's very age dependent, right so, asking a, a five-year-old what are the three numbers that come before 17 is an amazing thinking task, not so much for a 13 year old. So they're encountering this task at a time where this requires them to think uh, asking students to add fractions is an amazing thinking task Until we teach them how to do it.
Speaker 1:Then it becomes a mimicking task. So again, it's also not just when it intersects with their development, but it also when it intersects with what you have done to either set up a mimicking or thinking situation. So thinking tasks are really just tasks that are going to cause students to think how we form random groups. It turns out that the optimal way to do it is to do it randomly, except that wasn't good enough. It had to be visibly random. The kids had to believe that you were randomly forming these groups.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and how many are in a group matters too, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, three in a group was optimal. Some settings we had to start with groups of two. So when we work with very, very young children, we had to start with groups of two because they're still learning to collaborate. When we worked with vulnerable populations, we had to start with groups of two because they're still learning to trust. The only exception to groups of three was when we worked with very small class sizes. So when the numbers got below 12 or 15, the students felt like in groups of three they were always with the same students all the time, which is they're not wrong, right, like if I have 12 students in a class and I make groups of three, odds are tomorrow's groups of three are going to have significant overlap with today's groups of three, so the kids don't feel that change. So in those settings we actually found groups of two work better.
Speaker 1:We need thinking tasks. We need to get to. The students need something to think about. They need someone to think with. Those are the collaborative groups, which were visibly random. Groups of three, groups of two if we have small class sizes, and the optimal work surface was having students in their random groups stand and work at a vertical whiteboard except it doesn't have to be a whiteboard, it just has to be vertical and erasable. And those are sort of the core foundations to building a thinking classroom. That's how we start. There are 11 more practices, but that's where we start. That sort of radically transforms the environment and the setting in which students are used to working and it causes them to behave very differently.
Speaker 2:How did you find all of this out? Like when you were like starting to research this, like why, why did you pick those things? Like what led you to tell us the story of discovering that?
Speaker 1:Well, the 14 core routines was just from watching teachers and sort of cataloging what are the different things teachers do in a classroom. But now how do we start to find the innovative approaches to each of these? A huge part of what I was doing was taking a close look at how effective things were to begin with, a sort of status quo. So the status quo on grouping, for example, is that teachers either use strategic groupings where they carefully select who the students are going to work with, or they let the kids pick their own group. So that was sort of the status quo right. And when I studied that because I always did status quo studies right, like that, because I always did status quo studies right Like what how's it working right now?
Speaker 1:And the status quo research on that we surveyed hundreds of kids asked one question. The question was if you knew you were going to work in groups today to fulfill a task, what is the likelihood you would offer an idea? And 80% of kids and it didn't matter whether they were in strategic groups or self-selected groups 80% of kids said that they were unlikely or highly unlikely to offer an idea. Wow, can?
Speaker 3:I interject really quick. I was talking to my son about this on the way to school and I shared that statistic with him because he goes to a hybrid school. They already do a lot of these practices. He said last year in math they did it vertically, they were in randomized groups. I don't know how many were in a group. And he even said, even though they were still doing this practice, he had said well, yeah, I'm number two. There's one person that knows all the answers and I'll rely on him, but then I'm the second one. But in this subject I'm the number one and kids join my group. Can I tell them the answer? So it was really interesting to hear that from a 14 year old. He's already. He identifies that that is what happens in his hybrid, his progressive school as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and kids. You know, if kids enter into a working into a group, already sort of predetermining for for themselves that they're not going to contribute, then they're not going to be thinking, they're going to be very, very passive. So the question then is what is the alternative? So here comes this contrarian approach, which is well, if what we're seeing is working so so badly, why not try the exact opposite? So how do we? What is the exact opposite of, um, strategic groups or self-selected groups? And here comes the randomness, right like let's just if, if we're, if either the teacher is very focused on who's going to work together or the kids are very focused on who's going to work together, how do we just take that away from them? And then here comes the random. Likewise with the vertical whiteboards, right like we were seeing kids who spent more time sitting and writing in their notebooks in a 24-hour period than they spent sleeping, right, wow, like the notebook has become this sort of catch-all, right, right, they write notes during class. They do their homework in their notebook. Adrian's guilty.
Speaker 3:I'm writing even as we speak, so maybe I'm not thinking because I'm writing.
Speaker 1:No, it's not that at all.
Speaker 1:It's just that this notebook became a place where the students either sort of passively took notes or they sort of mimic their way through things, and notebook had all these sort of cognitive associations for students as a way of being. And how do we disrupt that, like what is the exact opposite of sitting and writing on paper? So we tried standing and writing on a whiteboard and it's sort of and then from there you kind of then nuance and see what other variations you can make and what other things you can learn around that. So there is this contrarian approach to it. I actually summarize my work actually in a different way, though I say that I do results first, research, and what I mean by that is that I'm in pursuit of reproducible results.
Speaker 1:So what is something I can do as a teacher that will cause thinking to happen in ways that is very robust? That seems to work in every setting with a wide variety of ages of kids. Getting them up at a whiteboard is a reproducible result. We see the same result everywhere we go. It's reproducible. Now let's try to understand why that is right, like, rather than the other way around, let's, rather than trying to reason our way towards, uh, a particular way of teaching, let's just try a lot of different things until we start to find something that works. Now, keep working on it until it becomes reproducible, right like it's working in every setting, and now try to understand. So I call it results first research.
Speaker 3:So you've been talking a lot about thinking tasks. Can you tell us a little? We mentioned mimicking, but what are some other non-thinking tasks that you saw as you were going into all these classrooms?
Speaker 1:Oh, I think you mean non-thinking behaviors.
Speaker 3:Non-thinking behaviors yes.
Speaker 1:Right. So mimicking was the largest. About 50% of students were exhibiting mimicking behaviors and what we have to understand is that mimicking is not thinking and mimicking is not learning in the same way that we want students to learn in ways that is going to help them continue to be successful and productive in the future and productive in the future. Yeah, so it was about the largest category. The other behaviors were slacking, just off-task stalling. Stalling is a way of delaying, not working. So, for example, going to the bathroom, getting a drink of water, going to your locker, sharpening my pencil, sharpening all my pencils these are all stalling behaviors. How is stalling different from slacking? Interestingly, slackers don't care what the teacher thinks about them, right? So they're willing to be visibly off task in front of the teacher. They don't care what the teacher thinks of them. Stallers care a lot, so they care what the teacher thinks. So they hide behind a facade of legitimate off task behavior. Right, Like, going to the bathroom is an off task behavior? It is, but it's a legitimate off task behavior. It's allowed, Whereas playing on my cell phone is not an allowed off task behavior, right? So that's a big difference between stallers and slackers.
Speaker 1:Then we had the fakers. Fakers are pretending to be working, but they're not really working. They have the outward appearance of being very engaged and very busy. Fakers, like stallers, care a lot what the teacher thinks about them but rather than hide behind a facade of legitimate off-task behavior, they hide behind a facade of on-task behavior, but it's just a facade Behind it. They're just pretending to work, they're not actually doing anything, and these three categories together made up about 30% of the students.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is I'm in Australia right now and I was working in Brisbane last week and there was a researcher in Brisbane who had reproduced this study in classrooms in Australia where she went in and looked at what are the behaviors we call them student behaviors of students in sort of traditional or normative classroom and her results were almost identical to mine. Right, Like my research was done in Canada, hers was done in Australia and the percentages were like within 3%, on each of those categories she found 53% of students were mimicking, whereas I was closer to 50%. Like it was really remarkable to see how, how close these behaviors stacked up across very different educational contexts.
Speaker 2:And did you like you're just doing lots of classroom observations to get these statistics? Like is that you're out in the field?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and how do you are there like how did you, did you observe a lot? And then you know you're just like note-taking, and then you kind of see the categories, or do you kind of define the categories this is like a hypothesis first and then go in and observe, or how did that work?
Speaker 1:Well, it depends on where you are in the research.
Speaker 1:Right At the outstat, it's really just a lot of observations and documenting behaviors. And then you end up in this where you're categorizing I call it lumping and splitting You're trying to see which behaviors are actually the same behavior and which behaviors that maybe seemingly are the same or different and, depending on what you're observing, you're going to get a different catalog of behaviors right, like so this idea of slacking, solving, faking and mimicking. This emerged during what we call now you try one activities. This is where the teacher has done direct instruction and modeled how to do something and done examples and now turns to the students. They say now you try one. So the catalog of behaviors is very different when we observe students doing homework like how are they behaving during that time? And the catalog of behaviors is very different when the students are doing the I write, you write notes, right? So it depends on what phase of a lesson or what the activity is is going to bring out a different catalog of behaviors and we call them student behaviors.
Speaker 1:Studenting is what students do in a learning situation.
Speaker 3:I like that term it's like parenting, but for students and the environment has really created a lot of those student behaviors of the desks and rows. I think that's interesting too. How you talk about the actual environment of the classroom is really important. And when you said a disorganized environment, I had a visceral reaction because I was like, wait, but not too disorganized. So I was like, okay, but that's really interesting that you discovered that, because with our micro schools, most of them are in homes, so the kids are on couches and tables are always, so it's very, it's orderly, but it's not perfectly in rows with chairs, hard chairs, under fluorescent lights. So I'm sure that helps our students in micro schools think more, which leads to more learning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. This was actually an interesting study for me because it wasn't one of the variables to begin with. This idea that how we arrange the furniture in the room makes a difference. Right, that was something that emerged by looking at outliers in the data, where we were having these great successes in most settings, but every once in a while we were really struggling to get students to think, using practices that have been very successful in different settings, and what was variant between those was how the rooms were set up.
Speaker 1:And what we found was that these uber-organized, these Pinterest-ready classrooms were actually creating barriers to thinking and, at a psychological level, what it was doing was projecting up perception, that x, that, uh, perfection was important, and this created an unsafe learning space. Right, like for for the majority of students, when they feel they're under the microscope of perfection, it becomes really debilitating to them. They, because thinking is messy, it requires you to take risks and make mistakes, and and so on and so forth, and when the environment is screaming that you've got to be perfect and always perfect, that was creating this barrier room. Can a room without students in it still be a thinking classroom or a non-thinking classroom?
Speaker 1:And I started to think actually on my experiences going into workshops or professional development, and I started to realize that when you walk into a room where you're going to be the learner, when you walk into a room, how the room is set up immediately tells you how you're going to behave that day.
Speaker 1:So if you walk into a room and all the chairs are sitting in these endless wide rows, everything is fronted towards a podium, you know what you're in for that day and you adjust your behavior immediately, right. Whereas if you walk in and it's round tables and there's chairs all the way around the tables and there's um, there doesn't seem to be a projector screen like you, you're like okay, this is going to be a different type of setting and I'm going to behave differently in here. So the room says a lot to the learner about who they should be that day, and what we found was that we needed to like you're right, adrian, that it needs a bit of chaos, but not too much. And one of the easiest ways to create that just right amount of chaos is to sort of defront the room, to sort of have students sitting facing every which way and to sort to sort of take that that teacher centeredness, out of the space.
Speaker 2:I love that word you just coined you need to defront the room. I've never heard that before. I love it. What kind of tasks are typically given in a thinking classroom? Right, we have tasks that we're giving as teachers. We have student behavior. So like how does it look different to give students a task If I'm a teacher in a thinking classroom? Right, we have tasks that we're giving as teachers. We have student behavior. So like how does it look different to give students a task If I'm a teacher in a thinking classroom? We're trying to create that environment.
Speaker 3:And what about curriculum and our thinking tasks? I would like to kind of talk about that too.
Speaker 1:So it depends on where you are in your development of a thinking classroom, right? So when you're first starting to build a thinking classroom, right, like these, it's called building thinking classrooms, it's not called Shazam. You have a thinking classroom, you have to build it. So when you're first in those early days of building it.
Speaker 1:Right, you have to. You're building the environment, but you're also building the habits among the students, that culture of thinking. So in those early days, those first four to six days, we use what we call non-curricular tasks and by and large they would also be deemed to be rich. They're clearly mathematical in nature but they're playful. They feel like we're not trying to hit a learning outcome here, we're just playing with math. And the kids are more likely to give themselves to those tasks in the early days, because asking students to think suddenly is a big change for them, right? We got them in random groups, we got them up at the whiteboards and we're using this playful task. And about 10% of the time in a thinking classroom and that's just a rough estimate we would be doing those types of tasks, right, like four or five days at the beginning, and then every time they come back from spring break or a long weekend or the Christmas break, like we do a day or two of those again just to reinvigorate that culture of thinking in the room.
Speaker 1:But the rest of the time we're doing content like straight up out of the curriculum. And what can that look like? It can. Well, in the last two years I've taught or co-taught 160 lessons in K-12 classrooms all over North America, right? So, by and large, we're doing what every other teacher is doing. We're just doing it differently, right? Like so we could be teaching adding fractions or factoring quadratics or solving systems of linear equations, adding two-digit numbers, ordering decimals, like, and we're just taking stuff right out of the textbook.
Speaker 1:It's, but it's how we do it, right? So it's a very quick launch. We're not pre-teaching how to do it, we're just giving enough that they can get going. And then it's a carefully sequenced set of tasks that get progressively harder, right? So, for example, the first adding fraction question that they're going to encounter on a day could be one fifth plus three fifths. Right Like, it's really very simple going something very complex, but we're just doing content. There's nothing special about those tasks other than that they're carefully sequenced so that they're very incrementally getting more and more challenging. But they're right, they're tasks that you would open up any textbook and you would see.
Speaker 2:I think that is really powerful for two reasons. One, you're not asking a traditional teacher to completely upend the learning system that they have to exist within no right.
Speaker 2:So and I think that that a lot of I mean our solution does. So I'm like, oh, that's good, um, so that's really cool, and I also am loving the idea. I like having these non um, what did you call Non-academic tasks or non-curricular tasks? Right, they're still academic, but, yeah, not necessarily in that learning sequence. This is more playful. We're doing a lot of collaboration, like if that is unlocking a lot of connection for those kids and letting them like find that rest in their nervous system, like come into their prefrontal cortex and really be able to problem solve and to think, instead of like trying to keep themselves safely inside the box of perfection. They're really allowed to kind of come out and and be themselves.
Speaker 1:So um, and there's a number of reasons for that. One is that nobody in the group knows what the answer is. Right, like, like it's if one of the worst places for a student to be is in a setting where it feels like they're the only one who doesn't understand it, like I'm not getting it and I feel like I'm the only one who's not getting it.
Speaker 3:It levels the playing field.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and here we have this setting where it's like nobody knows what the answer is. We're all just playing with this, we're all trying to figure it out, and it becomes a really safe environment that way. But it's not just safe for the students, it's also safe for the teacher. You've got to remember that.
Speaker 1:They're also in this building thinking classroom mode right it's not like they know everything and now they're going to enact the thinking classroom. They're learning to be different in this space. So by doing it as a non-curricular, it also takes that pressure off of the teacher and allows them to be more safe in a space where they're trying to figure out new pedagogies, where they're trying to find their role in this place and learn alongside of the kids. So it's this we encourage non-curricular tasks not just when students need to get oriented towards thinking, but also anytime the teacher is going to play with a new pedagogy. And I think that goes beyond building thinking classrooms. If a teacher is going to experiment with a new pedagogy, take the curricular pressure off, pick a task that has nothing to do with the curriculum and use and try that, just so that you can really focus on your pedagogy without having to also think about the outcomes.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. I something. What did you say that I wanted to pull out? That no one knows the right answer. Like that the kids don't, you know. It's not like Adrian in your example. It's like, oh, in this class I'm the person with all the answers and so everyone wants to be in my group and like that's the culture of most classrooms. And I just had a good friend who is always micro-schooled with Brenda, her. He's in sixth grade now, a really good school. Like I would send my kids to this school.
Speaker 2:Like really, really strong, um, and he was like she's trying to to learn how to operate in a traditional classroom where there is a little bit more pressure, a little bit more judgment. And he was having a hard time knowing what to do. When he didn't know what to do and his mom was telling him like you're you asked the teacher, like that's her job. And he he just said if I ask a question, all the kids will think I'm stupid. And just nobody. Nobody sat him down and say look, said, look, kid, this is how it works in here.
Speaker 2:You don't know the answers, everyone's going to think you're stupid, right, he could just like absorb that. He knew that. Like it was very counter to how he'd like been, you know, educated in Prenda up until this point. But it's just this visceral vibe that like unless you're you're you're like really working hard to. I guess what I'm saying is like you're going against the current here and you need to be really intentional about how you're building that culture. And it's hard to do and I love that you're giving teachers permission to set that culture and that vibe in a non-curricular way so you're like relieving some of that, that pressure. But because that's a lot to ask of a teacher it is, and you know it's.
Speaker 1:Coming back to this experience of this young student who is sitting in a classroom and feeling like, if they ask a question, people are are going to judge them, and the reality is they're probably not alone. There's probably other students in the class who are also feeling the exact same way, and this is one of the beautiful things that happens with collaboration. In collaboration, we don't just learn from each other, but we get to learn that we're not all perfect, and what that does is it builds community, and with community comes empathy, and that we start to care for each other. And it's now about the process of learning, much more so than the products of learning that are important.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I love that. So at the end of all your chapters you have these little like notebooks with a macro move that you can have in a micro move, and the one that I'm pulling up is from chapter four, I believe, um, or chapter three, where students work in a thinking classroom. But as you were talking, it made me think of talk to the students, about valuing wrong ideas and not erasing others' work. I thought that was. I was like, oh, that's so good, because if no one knows the answer and they're all trying to figure it out, I think that really builds a culture, like you said, and then creates community, which creates empathy.
Speaker 3:And so not only are they thinking and they're learning, but they're learning so much more than just the academic skills, which is what we want in any environment that we're sending our kid to, especially if they're in a classroom for eight hours a day. We want them to be learning more than just the academic skills. So can we dive a little bit more into collaboration? And why is collaboration important? And then also, how does a building thinking classroom balance individual thinking with you know, collaborative work and thinking together in a group?
Speaker 1:Okay. So collaboration is important for a number of different reasons. One is that collaboration is a meaning making space right, like it doesn't matter how much you care for your kids. This is a beautiful Kathy Fosnode quote it doesn't matter how much you care for your kids, you can't understand for them, right, like I cannot understand for you. The only thing I can do is create a space in which understanding can start to happen, and then I can help you connect the dots. Right, but I can't understand for you. So collaboration is a great meaning making space. Now, why is it so great? So there's two reasons why it's so great. One is it's incredibly metacognitive. Right, so I was.
Speaker 1:I remember when metacognition was sort of the in thing. Right, Like this idea of thinking about thinking and how the research showed that if we can get students thinking about their thinking, that their learning improves and all of these different things, right. Here's the problem it's almost impossible to get students to think about their thinking. It is such a hard thing to try to get them to do, to slow down and not just focus on process. Right, like? They want to focus on the answer. They want to focus on the product. We want them to focus on the process.
Speaker 3:But is this more, but is it more in a normative classroom or are you finding it in more of a progressive?
Speaker 1:it doesn't matter, just in general you're just going way back in the years here to this idea of metacognition. Right, we've been trying to get kids to focus on process. They want to focus on the product, but metacognition is focusing on the process of the process, right, like it's about. It's not just being in the moment, it's about stopping yourself in the moment and reflecting on what's happening in this moment and what you're going to do next. Right, like it's incredibly difficult to teach kids how to do it.
Speaker 1:However, it turns out that the externalization of thought is an easily achievable form of metacognition. So I think every teacher who's listening to this has had this experience where the student puts up their hand and you walk over to them and by the time you get there, they go yeah, never mind. Or they pick up their binder and they walk over to you and they get all the way up to you and then they turn around and they walk back up to you and then they turn around and they walk back and what's happened there is that in the process of of walking to you or having you walk to them, they're preparing the question they're going to ask. Right, they're preparing their inner thoughts for externalization and in that process, they connect the dots and they don't need you anymore, because that externalization of thought, or preparation for externalization of thought, is incredibly metacognitive. So getting kids to talk to each other is a metacognitive process, and that's it increases learning. So that's reason number one.
Speaker 2:Real quick. Can I interject there? This is something that we train all of our micro school guides to do. When a kid answers a question, the first thing you do is ask like, what have you tried already? Like, bring me up to speed. And 90% of the time, just in vocalizing that, they're like oh, now I see Like.
Speaker 2:And it is that cognitive load, that work of like trying to take the abstract concepts that are like floating around in their problem space and collecting that into words and expressing it. That process helps them see their thinking, which is a metacognitive skill. And I was just talking to my husband the other day and he's a software developer and we were talking about metacognition, because that's what we talk about at our dinner table who doesn't? And he said that in the programming world it's a very common practice for developers to have a rubber duck right by their desk and if they're struggling with a coding problem, they will explain the problem to the duck. And it's like if you're working on a really big problem, you go around your office and you collect everyone's ducks and you have a conference of ducks and you have to explain it to all of these rubber ducks. And in just the process of like externalizing you're thinking like that you find the answer. So, yes, this is. I love this concept.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that was the first reason. So that's one reason we want kids talking to each other because, like, because talking to yourself is not as effective as talking to someone else.
Speaker 2:Nor ducks.
Speaker 3:Nor ducks.
Speaker 1:The second reason is this so I'm going to say I'm going to make two statements. Now, okay, you tell me which one is more inviting for you to want to contribute to here's statement number one. So this is what I did. Okay, that's statement one. Statement two is I'm wondering, if we tried this, what would happen?
Speaker 2:The second one.
Speaker 1:Which one is more inviting? The second one, yes.
Speaker 3:Number two. Number two Am I the winner?
Speaker 1:So what we have found is that there's a difference between what I call tentative language and absolute language. So absolute language is sort of this is what I did. This is how to do it, right. Tentative language is full of hedging. I wonder what would happen if, I'm wondering. Could it be what, if Right?
Speaker 1:So what's interesting is when kids talk to each other, they talk with tentative language. Right, there's all of this hedging, and what that hedging does is it invites them to respond and to contribute their own ideas, and it's sort of this wonderful space where it becomes really safe and conducive to add on to conversation. Right? And you've all been at a dinner party where you're like you're trying to connect with someone, you're trying to talk to them, and all they do is give you sort of these absolute answers, right, and you're like there're trying to connect with someone, you're trying to talk to them, and all they do is give you sort of these absolute answers, right, and you're like there's nothing to hold on to, there's nothing to sort of extend the conversation from, but then you talk to the other person who's full of wonder and ponder and hedging, and it's like so easy to get in conversation with them. Right, it's the same thing in classrooms, right, when kids are working together, they use tentative language and it invites them to keep staying engaged. Who uses absolute language in the classroom?
Speaker 3:Teachers Right.
Speaker 1:And which is not as inviting. It's smooth, it doesn't have a lot of handholds. It doesn't invite us to engage with it in the same way. So I think there's, like I said, two reasons why collaboration is so important. One is a metacognitive nature and the other one is that it's full of this tentative language that just keeps a conversation going.
Speaker 3:What are some practical tools that you use in collaboration? Some of the things that come to mind is like one marker in the group, not erasing. So are there some other practical tools that a teacher listening to this can start implementing whenever they have groups working together?
Speaker 1:Right. So well, first of all, you've got to give them something to talk about, right, and this is a form of a thinking test, and we don't need an icebreaker Right. So well, first of all, you've got to give them something to talk about, right, and this is the form of a thinking test. And this we don't need an icebreaker Right. Icebreakers are for settings where they're, where we don't want to talk to each other. Give them something to talk about, give them a thinking task, culture of a thinking classroom. They'll start every lesson with something that makes kids want to talk to each other. So, would you rather? A would you rather task is a great example of that. Right Like would you rather chew on tinfoil or shave your head with a cheese grater?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, tough choice. But I'm thinking now You're going to have something to say about it.
Speaker 1:And you're going to want to talk to each other about it, right? Like waffles or pancakes. Right, everyone's got an opinion. They're going to want to talk about it. Right, it's pie or cake, it's. They want to talk. Give them something to talk about so that they can start talking. Thinking tasks are things that they can talk about, not knowing tasks, right. Knowing tasks is where one person comes in with their absolute knowledge and they're kind of like oh, this is how we do it. No, a thinking task puts everyone in that space where they have to enter into a tentative discourse.
Speaker 1:One marker, as you said, right, and we're going to share that marker. We're going to move that marker. We're going to move that marker. It's got to move on a regular basis. We can also set other practices, like whoever has the marker is not allowed to write any of their own ideas. So now you have to listen to each other, because you've got, you're acting as a scribe, and if you have an idea, you've got to pass the marker and then articulate and we're getting into that metacognitive. That's genius. It also makes it really safe for students to hold the marker, because if they don't have to contribute an idea, holding the marker becomes a really safe space to be.
Speaker 1:So it's a great way to feather in kids who are sort of tentative or unsure about themselves. Some teachers will use sentence stems at the beginning, um, when they're first learning to, to collaborate together. Having some sentence stems, sort of like, just like three or four things that you can start a statement with, and they'll have those up on the whiteboard, and I've seen teachers use those very effectively. Um, and this idea of let's not erase work so easily, let's, let's just find other space to work, let's just keep going, because we may want to come back to that, but it's also honors that tentative space of I'm willing to try something, and it doesn't have to be perfect yeah it makes me think of.
Speaker 3:there's this picture from the early days of Prenda of a big whiteboard and they were trying to come up with all the core values and nothing was erased. It was just all these ideas, and it's so cool because even to this day, it gets shared often and we revisit that. So, even though that was done, however many years ago, it's really cool how it sparks us to keep thinking and keep moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. I have a son who is I will say he's maybe like math allergic. Right now he's like having an allergic reaction to math temporarily, hopefully and he we've, over the last like two years, had a lot of like very emotional times about getting the math done, figuring things out. Who are we as learners learners, how do you know? Like lots of good conversations, but a lot of like me struggling to just like stay calm because I, growing up with the I'm not a math person like have a lot of tenderness around. Like he's asking about math and I'm like I want to show up for him in this moment. I want to be able to be supportive, um, but I also don't know the answer, and so it's, in one sense, like good for him, like he also, it gives him permission to not know the answer, and then I'm like actually modeling, figuring it out with him, Right, but the time that I lost my patience the most with him this is last year.
Speaker 2:He had done a lot of good work and then he put his answer into our like online curriculum and it was wrong and he'd erased all of his work. And then he put his answer into our online curriculum and it was wrong and he'd erased all of his work. And I came over and I was like, buddy, please don't erase your work. I didn't react to this as I should have, but something died in me when I saw it. I was like, oh, you did all of that and we could have learned. We could go back and we could learn, we could figure out where you're at. All of your mistakes are actually forward steps and we want to be able to see those like look back on our stepping stools to see like, okay, we're, we're closer to the right answer now, which is an important destination. But we want to be able to look back and see where we've come and to not like make those mistakes in shame, right?
Speaker 1:well, but you're, you're swimming against the current here, and the reason is this All right, so students don't listen to what we say, they listen to what we do.
Speaker 3:Yes, we know that. But it's hard.
Speaker 1:So it doesn't matter how much you say that the work is important. What are they being asked to put into the system?
Speaker 2:The right answer the right answer.
Speaker 1:The right answer yeah, it doesn't matter what we say, it matters what we do. We're not that.
Speaker 1:The program's not asking him to put their work into the system right right right and to put the answer into the system, and I understand the logistics of that because the that feedback can be provided on answers in a really easy way. It's harder to do that on work, but the reality is that's what he's hearing, right? He's hearing the answer is important, that the work is not important and it doesn't matter how many times you say that verbally. How are you going to show that? Yeah, so if you're working side by side with a student, if you want to show that the work is important, give them the answer.
Speaker 1:Say the answer is 17. Now let's see the work. Yeah, now what we're saying is the answer is not important. It's so not important that I gave it to you already.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:So there's one example of that, right? So this idea that students don't listen to what we say, they listen to what we do. Now I want to come back to another thing about this stress because I have three kids, right, they're all grown. But like, sitting at that kitchen counter working through hours of homework, and it's like the and knowing this is just not fair, because I know there's kids in this class who finished these questions before the bell even rang and here we're dedicating an hour and a half to it at home, right? So one of the really core principles of building thinking classrooms that has emerged in our work is that in a thinking classroom, everybody works for the same amount of time. They get through different amounts of work.
Speaker 1:Now, what if you were sitting at the table with your child and it wasn't based on how many questions they got through? But we're going to work for a fixed amount of time, right, like we're going to work on this for 20 minutes. It doesn't matter how much we get through, and it's 20 minutes for everybody and we're all going to, and it doesn't matter how much. We're all going to get through different amounts. But think about how equalizing that is right and it's it's a really important principle because it disincentivizes speed, it emphasizes process, it emphasizes being present, all of these different things that it's about. We're working for the same amount of time, rather than doing the same amount of work and taking different amounts of time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker 3:So many classrooms yeah, still have timed tests. My son, when he was in a traditional environment he's now homeschooled, His teacher's actually here working with him he took it was his very first time test in first grade, so he's six taking a time test and the teacher and he finished it in time. He was so stressed out and the teacher wrote on the top next time, this is what a nine looks like. This is what a four looks like. Next time you will get every single one of these wrong. He didn't want to go back to school because of that one thing. So I'm curious about tests. We brought it up. Katie said she found her to standardized test scores and now, oh, I am a math person because of my scores. I'm really curious about assessment and tests and test scores. And how do we know that they're actually learning if we're not assessing? Like, how does that all fit into building thinking classrooms?
Speaker 1:well, building thinking. Classroom still has assessment in it, and whether, if you, if you do tests, that's. I think test is still an incredibly efficient way to gather a huge amount of data about your students, so testing is still part of this.
Speaker 1:It's what about grades like yeah, it's what we do with the data. That is different, right? So building what we found was, if you really want to enact all the things in a thinking classroom and then start to value it, you're going to have to shift to a standards based assessment strategy, and I don't think we need to talk about that because that would take three podcasts on its own. But assessment is still a part of this and grading. The difference is this See, by and large, the system doesn't care what you do in your classroom. When it comes to your teaching practice, right, like how you deliver content, how you teach in the room, there's a lot less stakeholders involved in that than there is assessment. The minute you start talking about testing and assessment, the number of stakeholders multiply. Right now, we got we got colleagues and administrators who are either constraining or judging. We got the system itself right at the state level who that is telling you that certain things have to happen or is sort of judging if you're not doing certain things? We got parents right.
Speaker 1:Everybody has eyes on when it comes to testing and assessment. And you got to really have your ducks in a row when you enter into shifts in assessment practice, because there's more eyes on Whether or not you're doing cards or popsicle sticks for randomizing your groups. Like nobody cares cares whether or not you have kids writing on a whiteboard or a vinyl picnic table cover that is erasable nobody cares. Right like it's. But when you start doing group tests versus individual tests or group tests in addition to individual tests, a lot of people care, right so it's like make so. One of the things I always say about assessment is like I never talk about assessment on a first date. Right like it's. Like let's work on our practices first. And when our practices, when it feels like our assessment practice is not in alignment with our teaching practice, that's when we start to think about what testing should look like.
Speaker 3:And I want to mention, too, that you have another book that goes along with the orange book, so this is really good because we're more in the space of it's, more homeschoolish, you know, and so we're already having these environments that are set up in ways that are conducive to thinking, and so this can you explain a little bit, like if someone is listening to this and they're like oh well, I'm not a classroom teacher, so this doesn't really apply to me. Or you know, how can we implement these ideas in any kind of educational environment?
Speaker 1:So the blue book was called Modifying Thinking Classrooms, was written as a supplement to the orange book. So you can't read the blue book on its own. It will not make sense. You have to read the orange book. And then the blue book is a bunch of chapters on how to adapt the things that you have learned in the orange book for sort of nonstandard settings. So what if I'm homeschooling? What if I work in a resource center where everyone's working on self-paced? What if I'm teaching online? What if I'm just working with small groups? What if I'm working one-on-one? So these are sort of how do we enact these principles of building thinking classrooms in these sorts of atypical settings? But there's a third book as well, so the green book which just came out.
Speaker 3:I didn't get the green book. I only have the orange and the blue book.
Speaker 1:So the green book is co-authored with Megan Giroux and it's called Math Task for the Thinking Classroom, k-5. And it's all of the research that has happened since the orange book was published, because it was published in 2020. So there's been developments. So it's got the new stuff in there, but it's also it's organized around how to what a lesson looks like. So it's got 20 non curricular tasks and 30 curricular task sequences and it's got the entire sort of lesson plan. So it's like how do I launch this? What's the actual script for launching? Here's the sequence of tasks. Here are the extensions. How do I differentiate this? How do I consolidate this? What does notes and check your understanding questions look like in this task? So it's entirely organized around that. The 6 to 12 book is being written right now. It should be out in 2025. So it's um. It's also a really good resource for a teacher who wants the real sort of resources to actually launch and and sustain that's awesome.
Speaker 2:We're on this topic. How can people find out more about your work? Obviously, these books I'm assuming they're all on Amazon. How else can people explore your work?
Speaker 1:Go to buildingthinkingclassroomscom. Everything is there. There's a resource page. You can pursue Lots of different things. You'll find all the podcasts are listed there, including this. One will be listed there there, including this one will be listed there. Um, every everything that's been published all the research, the all the social media communities that exist, right. So, there's over 50 Facebook groups that are dedicated to building thinking classrooms. Uh, the main one has over 60,000 teachers in it. There's a primary one, there's intermediate, there's there's ones that are linked to particular curricula. There's ones that are linked to particular curricula. There's ones that are linked to other subjects. Um, I don't think there's one for let's call it homeschooling right now.
Speaker 2:But I'll go start it community that's building thinking micro schools.
Speaker 3:Yes, because micro schools are like popping up everywhere all over the country, even just with Brenda. So, katie, you're on to something, yeah.
Speaker 1:And all of these communities are started with by teachers who just want to have like minded individuals to to communicate with. They're incredibly nurturing. People ask questions, they get answers. It's, it's. These are really amazing places to be. You know, the journey into making changes in a classroom can be lonely, and it's great if the person next door is someone who's doing it as well, but if next door is 20 miles away, then maybe having these sort of virtual communities is a real benefit for them. So there's lots of stuff out there on social media, but buildingthinkingclassroomscom will give you access to everything we've pretty much talked about here today.
Speaker 3:Love it Awesome, and I love that this doesn't just have to be applied to math. You can really do a lot of these concepts in any subjects, and so maybe in the future you can write a book about that.
Speaker 1:Well, it will be written. It's on the docket. It's just going to be called Building Thinking Classrooms. No subtitle there is, yeah, and we're implementing it in every subject in every grade, so it's. What really changes is what constitutes a thinking task? Right, like so what does a thinking task look like in language arts? And it's a little different than it looks like in math, but your resources still have them. It's just again. How do we intersect with that question vis-a-vis their developmental readiness and our pre-teaching of it?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I just love how thorough you have been in your research and, like Katie mentioned earlier, I asked you like, did you go and observe classrooms? It's like, yeah, you were in a lot of classrooms across so many different socioeconomic sizes, sizes you know, like all that. You did it like across the gamut, which is amazing. And so I'm wondering and we asked this question to all of our guests is who is someone who's kindled your love of learning, curiosity, motivation or passion, like, who has, like, sparked this in you to even, you know, dive into this work?
Speaker 1:So to a large extent I would say my kids have kindled this in me. You know my kids school was hard for them but you know my kids' school was hard for them and they struggled with school and the normative structures of school and I really I think part of my journey has been about trying to create environments that would have been better for them and so I think that is a source of motivation and, to a large extent, all students that I encounter like I said, I've been in 160 classrooms in the last two years there's very particular students I remember from those encounters and how can I make a difference for them today?
Speaker 1:And what if? What if this continued? Could that make a difference for them in their life? Right, so that's so.
Speaker 1:Students are a huge source of motivation for me. I want students to have good experiences in school. Another source of motivation is, of course, teachers. Teaching like teachers don't get paid enough to do this just for the money. It's too hard a job. There has to be satisfaction in this endeavor, and the number of teachers who have shared with me that building thinking classrooms has extended their career, has revitalized their career, has reignited their passion for teaching, is almost endless. The number of people I hear from around this so it's how can I help a teacher also really enjoy their work? We entered into teaching because of a calling, and it's really easy to become disenfranchised from that because the weight of what's expected of us just increases all the time. So how can we find some satisfaction in the work we do? And I think building thinking classrooms is helping teachers do that too. So whenever I hear from a teacher, or a teacher talks to me about how they have this passion for teaching, again that's a huge source of motivation for me.
Speaker 2:Love it. Thank you so much for your time today and for coming on the Kindle podcast, Peter. We've really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 1:Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you. So that is it for for today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the kindled podcast. If it was helpful to you, please like, subscribe and follow us on social at prenda learn. If you have a question you would like katie to address, you just need the email podcast at prendacom. You can also go to our website and sign up for our weekly newsletter, the sunday spark. The kindle podcast is brought to you by prenda prendacom. You can also go to our website and sign up for our weekly newsletter, the.
Speaker 2:Sunday spark, the Kindle podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school built on all of the ideas that we talk about here on the Kindle podcast. If you want more information about becoming a Prenda guide, just go to prendacom. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.
