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November 15, 2020 - March 7, 2021
instead started referring to them as vertical non-permanent surfaces (VNPSs) after the qualities that proved to make whiteboards so conducive to thinking—vertical and easily erasable.
Likewise, using vertical whiteboards is enhanced by each group having only one marker.
When every member of the group has their own marker, the group quickly devolves into three individuals working in parallel rather than collaborating.
Finally, the experience is made easier for you as a teacher if you carry a marker that is a different col...
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When you are first starting out, giving it to the student standing furthest from the board is a good strategy. This is subtle.
Less subtle is asking the group who hasn’t held the marker yet and giving it to that student. Even less subtle is setting a timer that is loud enough for all students to hear and telling them that every time the timer goes off, they must pass the marker to another member of the group.
The wide range you see in your students’ abilities when they are working individually in their notebooks is a product of their hugely varied acquisition and retention of mathematical knowledge. When students get into their groups and start working on vertical surfaces, the skills they need to be successful are things like communication, perseverance, patience, self-reliance, et cetera. And although these skills will vary throughout the room, the variance is typically not as great as with mathematical knowledge. When students get into their groups and start working on vertical surfaces, the
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You should set rules that students are not allowed to erase someone’s work without their permission.
Different classroom setups allow for different types of learning.
Every time we worked in classrooms that were super organized—desks or tables in perfect rows, in-baskets and out-baskets for all eventualities, everything color coded and in its place—we had more difficulty generating thinking.
But, when we were working in classrooms that were disorderly, but not overly so, we had better results.
Thinking is messy. It requires a significant amount of risk taking, trial and error, and non-linear thinking. It turns out that in super organized classrooms, students don’t feel safe to get messy in these ways.
On the other hand, thinking should not be completely unstructured. It needs elements of representation and organization for patterns to begin to emerge. Therefore, overly chaotic spaces are not the answer either.
They were relaxed spaces in which students felt safe to take risks, to try, and to fail. At the same time, they were not so chaotic that the physical structure of the classroom became a distraction to the students. It seemed that a classroom needed to have a just-right amount of disorder for thinking to flourish. I wanted to find this minimum amount of disorder.
It turns out that how desks and tables are arranged within a classroom says more about what kind of learning behavior—and hence, thinking behavior—is expected in that room than anything else.
the room was set up immediately told you what was about to happen, and that began to shape your attitudes and behaviors long before the session facilitator began speaking. How the furniture is organized in the room makes a difference.
a thinking classroom needs to be organized in such a way that says thinking, collaboration, and risk taking are expected.
The first thing to emerge from these data was that straightness equated to order—orderly teacher and orderly teaching.
Fronting the room, like straightness and symmetry, communicates that order and compliance are expected in a room. It also communicates that students will be doing a lot of watching and listening. If all three of the furniture placement characteristics—straightness, symmetry, and fronting—are present (see Figure 4.2), then students perceive a room to be very orderly and expect that all activity will be centered on the teacher.
A second result that emerged from this experiment was that we only needed to defront a room in order to also destraighten and desymmetrize it, as long as we defined defronting as ensuring that every chair in the room was facing a different compass direction. Doing so automatically ensured that there would be no straight or symmetrical furniture placement.
Defronting the room had an immediate effect on both the students and the teacher. Students began to collaborate more, and teachers started talking less. It turns out that how the desks and tables are placed not only sends a message of what is expected, it changes what actually happens.
further refinements to how desks and tables were placed yielded no better results than the defronted classroom.
That is, use your position in the room to contradict the projector’s (or interactive white board’s) message that it is at the front of the room.
three elements that go into fronting a room—how desks or tables are arranged, where the students are seated around these desks or tables, and where the teacher positions him- or herself.
By the end of this chapter you will have learned what types of questions students ask and which ones we, as teachers, should be answering.
a more interesting question as it relates to thinking classrooms is how many questions teachers are answering.
a typical teacher will answer between 200 and 400 questions a day,
practices that could get students to think were often being undone by teachers answering every question being asked of them.
students only ask three types of questions: proximity questions, stop-thinking questions, and keep-thinking questions.
in most cases proximity questions consisted of queries about things that students had either already figured out or made decisions or assumptions about.
the number of students with legitimate proximity questions paled in comparison to the number of proximity questions asked for the purpose of establishing, or reestablishing, roles.
these questions are motivated by the reality that, for students, thinking is difficult, and it’s hard to decide for themselves that what they are doing is correct. If they can just get you to do that for them, their life would be so much easier. So students ask this question with the hope that you will answer it, and they can stop thinking.
Keep-thinking questions, on the other hand, are asked by students so they can continue to engage with the task at hand. These are often clarification questions or questions about extensions the students want to pursue. Students who ask these questions are motivated to keep going—keep working, keep thinking.
of the 200–400 questions teachers answer in a day, 90% are some combination of stop-thinking and proximity questions.
answering these proximity or stop-thinking questions is antithetical to the building of a thinking classroom.
The only questions that should be answered in a thinking classroom are the small percentage (10%) that are keep-thinking questions. But this raises two new problems—how to quickly discern the types of questions being asked and how not to answer 90% of them?
Focusing on the consequences of responding to their statement quickly helps you discern the intention behind the question. Are they trying to get you to help them to stop or keep thinking?
what to do in place of answering a proximity or stop-thinking question. Students can be very persistent in their efforts to get you to help them reduce their workload, and how you respond to this is important.
10 things to say in response to a
proximity or stop-thinking question. Isn’t that interesting? Can you find something else? Can you show me how you did that? Is that always true? Why do you think that is? Are you sure? Does that make sense? Why don’t you try something else? Why don’t you try another one? Are you asking me or telling me? Each of these suggested responses is a variation of answering a question with a question.
answering a question with a question (and only a question) was only effective when it was immediately followed by the teacher walking away from the students, with no other statements or suggestions being made.
For students there is a big difference between having their question heard and not answered, and having their question not heard. The primary students were reacting to the latter of these. They assumed that their questions had not been heard.
No one likes to be ignored. So, we made a modification to the walking away strategy. Instead of walking away when a proximity or stop-thinking question is being asked, we would instead look at the student and smile as they asked their question. Then we would walk away.
This turned out to have a huge effect on the perceptions of students at all grades. Instead of feeling ignored, they now knew that they had been heard and that the teacher’s decision to not answer them was deliberate.
When coupled with the aforementioned building thinking classroom practices, students perceive the smile and walk away as you having confidence in their group, and the room as a whole, to resolve their question.
this is the first practice where we experimented with talking to students about what we were doing. When done correctly, two interesting things happen. The first is that students started to self-regulate the types of questions they were asking.
The second thing that happened was that students started using the language of the three types of questions to moderate their peers—“Dude!
The challenge was doing it correctly.
On the other hand, talking to students about the practice after two weeks of not answering proximity and stop-thinking questions, coupled with a lot of smiling and walking away, was met with very positive reactions—“So
This distinction between pre- and post-implementation discussion played out the same every time we experimented with talking to the students about why we were doing what we were doing—irrespective of the practice we were talking about.
