This year, Stacy Custodio and Maureen Ritter are leading a group of teachers through Peter Liljedahl’s research-driven text Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. While “math” may be in the title, teachers from multiple disciplines have begun implementing the author’s “toolkits” as they experiment with how to build students’ capacity for doing the heavy intellectual lifting. 

They identified the “studenting” behaviors teachers most want to eliminate, then introduced Toolkit #1, three strategies to begin building your thinking classroom: Thinking Tasks, Visibly Random Groups, and working on Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces. October’s meeting introduced Toolkit #2, where teachers role-played helping students through a task using only “Keep Thinking Questions” (this is harder than it seems and requires a lot of patience, from students and teachers alike!). 

The cohort wrapped the semester discussing a philosophical shift from “Homework” to “Check Your Understanding” questions and practiced developing scaffolded questions that will allow students to self-assess their progress towards mastery of learning targets. 

Gholdy Muhammad’s book Unearthing Joy serves as a guide for Melissa Thurlwell, Deanna Mazanek, and Julie Bryniczka’s cohort. Considering the average adult spends about one-third of their life at work, this group is focused on understanding how to identify, nurture, and purpose create a space for joy in our teaching and leadership.

Staff took September to identify what brings them joy in their life now, then reflected on past experiences from their own education, pinpointing what teachers did (or did not!) do that made those experiences so memorable. In October (National Bullying Prevention month!), members of the cohort turned inward to examine how we are often our own worst critics and discussed how that tendency gets in the way of joy.

To close out the semester, each staff member created an “action plan” to explore how well they are creating and nurturing joyful spaces here at work in their various roles. If we need to experience joy to feel fulfilled, how are we intentionally building in those opportunities for our students, too?