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

by Peter Liljedahl

Students, especially students above Grade 7, have been socialized to believe that questions are assigned from the textbook or workbook after they have first been shown how to do them. This is not an unreasonable assumption on their part, as questions are typically assigned from books near the end of the lesson—after a lesson full of worked examples. This assumption, however, interferes with the way they engage with the task. Rather than approaching questions in the book as something to think about, they approach them as something to be answered by mimicking the examples from the lesson and their notes. And when this does not work, rather than think about the question, they put up their hand and ask for help on how to do it.