Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning (Corwin Mathematics Series)

by Peter Liljedahl

Should I try to select something from every vertical surface for the guided gallery walk? No. This would create too much redundancy and would cause the consolidation to take too long. Over time, every student will have their work honored. It doesn’t have to happen every day. In this chapter you talk about consolidating and reifying at the level where students got to. And you also talked about leveling to the top as something that doesn’t work. Does that mean we can never lift students’ understanding above the level they got to? We can. But there is a limit to how far we can lift their understanding at a single point in time. What we saw in the research is that when we consolidated from the bottom, moving up through the levels that they had already worked through, we were able to lift their understanding up beyond where they got to. Leveling to the top doesn’t work because it starts the consolidation above (often too far above) where the students reached, rather than collecting them at the bottom, reifying ideas and terminology, and then moving upward.

Double Epistemic