Chapter 1--Building Thinking Classrooms

 What type of tasks we use:

Chapter 1 deals with the types of problems we use. It highlights one of the problems I have always had with the whole "rich task" genre--the tasks aren't in the curriculum! So you can rich task students all you want, but in the end, you aren't going to get through the material students are supposed to be learning in your class. I've worked to match up some of the YouCubed tasks to my curriculum and do use them where appropriate. And often, "rich tasks" that are specifically designed to go with your curriculum are weak and contrived. Liljedahl differentiates between non-curricular task and curricular ones. He admits there is a difference and talks about how you can use the non-curricular tasks to "prime" students to think more when presented with curricular ones (more on how to design those later). 

When we sent our students home again in November due to what turned out to be a non-credible covid scare, I was so disgusted that I figured having them work on non-curricular tasks wasn't going to damage any learning at that point anyway, so I switched to those. I don't know if I did enough of them or if, because we were working online, they didn't have enough of an effect. In the book he talks of using 3-5 tasks and that is what I did; but honestly, I don't know exactly what I am supposed to be seeing that will signal that students are ready to move on. Also, November was a crazy month with a fire that burned down half of the local town, so probably not the best timing. I just know that when I switched to curricular tasks (online) it still seemed to take a long time and we still didn't make as much progress as I'd hoped. 

I think maybe I should use more of the non-curricular tasks now that we are back face to face. I didn't when we first started back (at the end of January) because we are so crazy far behind at this point. I also feel that a lot of my students are really thinking already, but some of them seem to need more priming. It's also possible that because we did a lot of review after returning to class that my curricular tasks were not as good as new learning might have been. We are on a week long break right now, so maybe when we get back I'll use a thinking task in a couple of my classes to start. Then we can move back into new curriculum. Liljedahl talks about using the thinking tasks at the start, but I don't remember seeing any mention of whether or not you should intersperse them occasionally, but I am going to try this strategy and see how it goes.