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Building Thinking Classrooms Online: A Closer Look at The Types of Tasks we Use

Peter Liljedahl and Judy Larsen

Many activities of teaching, and thus also activities of learning, are dictated by what can be referred to as institutional norms (Liu & Liljedahl, 2012). These are practices that transcend classroom norms (Cobb, Wood, & Yackel, 1991; Yackel & Cobb, 1996), and crystallize into patterns that occur in classrooms. Although what is taught in classrooms has evolved greatly over the course of the last 150 years, institutional norms that were laid down at the dawn of public education still dictate much of how teaching looks in classrooms today. In visits to 40 different K - 12 mathematics classrooms in 40 different schools, Liljedahl (2016, 2020) observed that in a typical lesson, there was very little oppor tunity, and even less need, for students to do much thinking. He posited that in order for this reality to change—in order to get more students thinking and thinking for longer—a radical departure from the institutional norms would be needed. Thus was born the Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) pro

ject which, for over 15 years, sought to empirically emerge and test pedagogical practices that not only afford opportunities to think, but necessitate think ing. This research involved more than 400 classroom teachers implementing hundreds of two - week mi cro - experiments. Each micro - experiment sought to measure the degree to which a specific practice im pacted the amount of thinking in the classroom. Emerging out this research are 14 teaching practic es that have been proven to produce more thinking in the classroom than the institutionally normative practices they sought to replace, but also more thinking than any of the other hundreds of practices experimented with (Liljedahl, 2020). In many cas es, these practices are radical departures from the norm. In some cases, less so. But in all cases, it was shown that the institutionally normative prac tices laid down at the dawn of public education

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 47, no. 1

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