Introduction--Building Thinking Classrooms

 The introduction gives you the background to Liljedahl's research. I had never actually heard the story behind his work, so it was nice to get this perspective. It is also good information to give people if you are trying to describe the book to them.  He talks about how teachers were designing their instruction based on "the assumption that students couldn't or wouldn't think." It seems to me that our instinct as teachers is to parse teaching down to such tiny pieces that students will have no excuse not to learn the material. We try to make it super easy for them to simply absorb knowledge if they just follow every little step in the process. It's the EL Thorndyke type of thinking. Unfortunately, it doesn't expect students to think. 

It is in this chapter that he uses the term studenting to describe the behaviors that students adopt in order to get by in the classroom. Liljedahl looked at studenting in three different classroom areas. In this chapter he talks about the ubiquitous "now you try one" type of problem. I'm definitely guilty as charged on this account. I remember attending Fred Jones Tools for Teaching workshop years ago and a huge part of this workshop dealt with teacher and student behaviors during this activity to try to maximize student learning. Liljedahl describes 5 main behaviors that students engage in here: slacking, stalling, faking, mimicking, and actually trying the problem. Jones devoted a lot of time on dealing with the first three behaviors. What I'm seeing now in my classrooms is that those behaviors are nearly non-existent as students work problems together on the whiteboards and argue over how to do problems. 

Mimicking is the behavior I found the most interesting. Because mimicking is actually what most teachers think of as learning behavior. As a teacher, if you had a classroom full of really good mimickers, you would think you were doing a fantastic job and probably your administrator would too. One of the big Jones activities is to create VIPs (visual instruction plans) which are basically a visual example that students can follow that will lead them through how to do the problem. You make the VIP as you go through the problem, then post it where students can follow it as they do the now-you-try-it problems. Most textbooks are written this way as well--worked examples, try this problems, practice problems. Good mimickers can "do math" using this method. Only they are not really thinking.

Eureka math turns that process on its head by going to the "Workshop" model of teaching. Unfortunately, most teachers aren't taught to use the workshop model and don't understand how it should be implemented to maximize thinking. The more I use the BTC methods in my room, the more I see that it is the tool teachers need to implement the workshop model as it is set up in Eureka Math. It isn't a perfect fit, but with just a little bit of tweaking, it is a good fit. Unfortunately, most teachers are stuck in the mimicking model of teaching. They want more "drill and kill" because that type of problem is the best to teach students to mimic. I love the irony that teachers say they don't want students to mimic and students say that mimicking is exactly what they think their teachers do want them to do. 

The rest of the chapter describes how he conducted his research and introduces the concepts that will be covered in the rest of the book.