Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 Quotes

“Problem solving is what we do when we don’t know what to do.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning

“It turns out that when students walk into a classroom that looks like every other classroom they walk into, they assume that the lesson is going to go like every other lesson they have been part of. And, therefore, they bring all of their habits and studenting norms into the room with them.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning

“Furniture is an enduring institutional norm, and we wanted to see what would happen if we upended it. I learned three things from this experiment. First, student thinking increased—and radically so.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning

“Thinking is a necessary precursor to learning, and if students are not thinking, they are not learning.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning

“For a curricular task to generate thinking, it should be asked before students have been shown how to solve it. Does this mean the task should come right at the beginning of the lesson? Yes. In Chapter 6 I will more thoroughly discuss how important this turned out to be. In the meantime, suffice it to say that thinking tasks should be asked in the first five minutes from the time you begin the lesson.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning

“It turns out that almost any curriculum tasks can be turned from a mimicking task to a thinking task by following this same formulation—begin by asking a question that is review of prior knowledge; then ask a question that is an extension of that prior knowledge.”
― Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning