A Guide to Routines to Support BTC
A Guide to Routines to Support BTC
Embedded Files
Devan Smith
January 2024
Thinking about trying BTC, but not sure what needs to happen to make it the best experience for everyone? Use this guide to help you define some structures that will help you rock a thinking classroom!
Stock up: You have WipeBooks, but what about other things? Dry-erase markers and erasers/cloths are a must!
Think about your material organization: Define how your classroom is going to look. In a BTC classroom, collaboration is king. Consider putting your students in pods of 3-4 and make sure to de-front the room. See the pictures to the right for examples of BTC classrooms.
It’s also important that your vertical white boards are easily accessible! Small classrooms are challenging, but you can make it work.
Invest in organization for your cloths and markers. We have seen teachers pin little dollar store baskets to bulletins or even use a binder clip to hold markers and cloths (See pictures to the right).
Little blue buckets from Katie Schweizer at BHS
Binder clips hanging from 3M hooks from Liz Kress at SHS
Pick a randomizing method: We love the card method, where you use cards to randomize students for tasks. However, we also discovered flippity through a community of BTC teachers here in VBCPS. Once you make a copy of the spreadsheet found on the website, you can populate it with your students for each block and the link is live forever! It is a major time-saver. We recommend modeling how you want randomizing to go for students and having some routines in place for when things go awry. In flippity, you can print the groups and also just snap a screenshot or picture to make sure groups are holding each other accountable!
Cards: Monica Lang & Pedro Cujardo
Find (or design) your tasks: BTC is all the rage right now and you can find tons of tasks online! We have a compendium of tasks created by VBCPS teachers here. There’s a link embedded on the first sheet for the BTC page curated by Liljedahl’s facebook group. For the most part, notes you’ve used in the past are probably already “thin-sliced”, which is a method of delivering a task described in this slidedeck. If you are interested in seeing BTC in action, connect with a specialist so we can coordinate a learning walk with you! Don’t forget to start each class with a thinking task (within 5 minutes).
Jessica Perez's Algebra 2 Class from BHS
Monitor Collaboration: It’s a great idea to have some tools in your toolbox for promoting collaboration, such as BTC structures, but also to keep it going and keep it functional. We recommend using Peter’s suggestions from the book. Every so often, prompt groups to rotate the marker to a new member (Marker Rotation) or whoever is writing shouldn’t be the one doing the thinking--someone else in the group should be instructing them on what to write (Scribe Protocol) to keep everyone in a group engaged. Keep groups to no more than 3 as much as possible, as we have seen first hand that groups larger than 3 struggle to stay on task. Collaboration and communication is not as stellar with groups larger than 3. Finally, if you want to increase mobility of knowledge in the room, consider trying one of the following:
Gallery Walk: Students rotate with groups to view other group’s work. Make sure to stop to huddle once or twice to synthesize observations and themes.
1 Stay, 2 Stray (or vice versa): 1 person stays at a board to showcase while 2 travel around to hear from the other groups.
Questioning: According to Liljedahl, there are two types of questions students ask: non-thinking and thinking questions. Non-thinking questions include proximity questions (students ask you a question when nearby because it is the social norm and/or to play at engagement) and stop-thinking questions, such as “is this graded?” or “did I do this right?”. We suggest practicing the smile & nod or answering non-thinking questions with a question. The goal is to answer ONLY thinking questions!
Extend Thinking: During lessons, it’s very important to provide the optimal experience, which means that students have to have a balanced flow. The challenge has to be appropriate leveled to their ability and gradually increase as the lesson goes on. Thin-slicing is great for optimizing the experience during learning!
Individual students and groups will have different levels of flow. Because of this, extensions will have to be given asynchronously, so it’s best to have them pre-prepared and to think about how you want to have group’s access them, as needed.
A great way to provide an extension for a group is to ask them to justify their answer. And then when they have done that, they can move on to explaining, which is actually harder than justifying! When they’ve successfully explained, they can move on to teaching another group.
Give Hints (the right way): Make sure you are providing support to students that doesn’t take their thinking away. Ask probing questions and then smile and nod and walk away or prompt them to work with others to confirm their understanding.
As always, if you are looking for support in implementing any of the BTC practices, contact Tina Mazzacane, DTAL Coordinator of Secondary Mathematics, or any of the HS coaches (see the About Us for contact information).
Page updated
Report abuse