Week 3: A Thinking Classroom

This week in class we discussed the article Building Thinking Classrooms. The article defines a "Thinking Classroom" as a space inhabited by thinking individuals, where students are working collectively, learning together, constructing knowledge and understanding through activity and discussion. (Liljedahl, 2016) A thinking classroom is one based on inquiry, where the teacher is not only delivering content and transmitting knowledge, but students have questions and use problem solving skills and collaboration to work through problems. A thinking classroom also deals with a good amount of struggles. If students are working together and thinking out loud about problems they are discussing how to work through them, through this students meet struggle. Struggle takes on a new term though, in allowing struggle and mistakes happen when problem solving helps to make your brain grow (Mistakes and Research, 2016). This weeks forum video Mistakes and Research discussed how mistakes allow for synapses in the brain to fire and growth is made, but getting an answer correct, no growth is made. It is because struggle and hard thinking is when the brain grows the most (Mistakes and Research, 2016). A thinking classroom is therefore a critical environment to cultivate that would allow students to work together, make mistakes and practice tasks to develop their learning.

In class we had our own example of a thinking classroom. We were given a variety of problems to work out with our table groups such as Tax Man or the Collatz Conjecture. During these tasks we did reach some struggles, or at least I did. But working collectively allowed for different perspectives to be encountered, and problem solving to become less difficult. The teacher walked around as a facilitator of discussion and when we thought we were done with beating the Tax Man, asked us to see if we could beat him in a better way. With more thought, we were able to beat the Tax Man better. We also used vertical non-permanent surfaces (whiteboard) to show our work. The benefit of using white boards or other non-permanent surfaces is that it gives students an opportunity to show their work to an audience. It also allows students to look around the room and visibly compare the problem solving strategies done by their peers. It allows students to get out of their seat and actively participate and be contributors of knowledge.

EDBE 8P54 Week 3 Slideshow. Teaching Mathematics for all learners.

These types of implementations in the classroom not only successfully build knowledge, but they are ways to trigger engagement. A thinking classroom is a meaningful experience that gives students responsibility to contribute to learning. A thinking classroom also allows for multimodal problem solving, activity, and collaboration which varies drastically from a traditional classroom. Just even these few simple differences make all the difference in engaging students and diverse learners. Diverse learners have so much more to benefit from this type of environment; they are able to collect strategies from their peers, visualize problems, ask questions openly and build confidence in their math skills while being a part of a solution team. In a thinking classroom worry over making mistakes does not exist so much, since it is an open environment to discuss strategies and work through problems collectively.

Sources:
Lesson 3a 360p. (2016). Retrieved September 23, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGV0HQujmKs

Liljedahl, P. Building Thinking Classrooms: Conditions for Problem Solving. Simon Fraser University (June 2016). Retrieved: September 23, 2016