Peter Lilijedahl’s book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics has shifted the thinking of many educators, in mathematics and beyond, around how institutional norms in education have encouraged the creation of studenting behaviours that often interfere with student thinking and learning. These norms unintentionally encourage slacking, stalling, faking, and mimicking behaviours that don’t lead the deep learning we’d hope, and sometimes assume, students are leaving our classes with.

Over 15 years of research, Liljedahl identified 14 factors where he in essence turned institutional norms on their head to see how student thinking would be impacted, and what he found was remarkable. In each and every case, this contrarian approach produced practices that generated more thinking than the normative baseline data. He ultimately refined his research into what he calls, optimal practices that promote thinking, and those are what Jill and I will explore over this series of bite sized learning videos.

The first strategy that Liljedahl recommends is that all classes are built around thinking tasks. He recommends that we present a thinking tasks within the first 5 minutes to ignite the minds of students . We think ALL classes can use this strategy to ignite the minds and energy of their students

The fourth strategy recommended by Liljedahl is to defront the classroom. The way we arrange furniture communicates our expectations. When we defront the classroom we communicate that thinking and collaborating is expected from all students. There are so many possibilities of how this can be used in ALL Secondary classrooms.

Do you ever feel like you answer an endless amount of questions? Do you ever wonder if answering those questions immediately actually stops students from thinking? In this video we explore how to responds to questions in a thinking classroom and these responses can work in any question!

Teachers spend a lot of time considering what tasks they offer students, but how often do you think about when, where, and how tasks are given? In this video we explore how the timing, location, and mode of delivering a task can impact the amount of thinking students do in your classroom.

In this video we explore homework. The research tells us that homework in it's current format does not work. How can you rebrand homework in your classroom?

How do we encourage and foster student autonomy? Who is the keeper of knowledge in the classroom? These are the questions we explore this week.

How do we keep flow in the classroom? How can we differentiate for every student? What do I do if a task is too easy for some, but too difficult for others? These are the questions we think about this week in our Hints and Extensions video.

Consolidation of learning is important in every classroom. This practice is used to ensure that students have clarity and depth of understanding of the topic. How we consolidate a task matters because the strategies used in consolidation can either leave students behind or bring all students further into the learning. So in this video we think about how to consolidate a task.

How do we make note-taking a valuable experience in a thinking classroom? We have students write them for their future forgetful selves. Notes are for students and by students.

What competencies do you value? How will you evaluate them in a thinking classroom? This week's video dives into evaluation in a thinking classroom

How to use formative assessment in a thinking classroom?

What do I grade? When do I grade? How do I use the grades? And do those grades accurately reflect the learning of the students? Those are the big questions we are thinking about in this video

If you’ve been following along with all 14 of our previous videos, you may be loving what you hear but feeling a bit overwhelmed about how to get started in your own classroom. Rest assured, that’s the focus of Liljedahl’s final chapter and we are summarizing it here!