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. The message they are receiving is that learning needs to be orderly, structured, and precise. In these perfectly organized classrooms, the physical spaces in which they are being asked to think is incommensurate with the messiness of thinking. This is a problem. On the other hand, thinking should not be completely unstructured. It needs elements of representation and organization for
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