Students can become great little actors doing the “” movements in a traditional classroom.student”, but I haven’t learned much. At a critical moment when the teacher chalks a problem on the board and asks everyone to write their answers, for example, one child pauses to sharpen his or her pencil, another doodles or pretends to be writing, and so on. Another child might stare at the sky. I’m thinking about the problem at hand. However, everything seemed fine to the teacher at the front of the classroom, who paused for a moment before revealing the answer.
This is the argument of Peter Liljedal, professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He has spent years researching what works in education. And I find that in this common classroom format, very few students actually think. His experiments show that he is probably less than 20 percent of his students and only 20 percent of the time.
Thinking for him means actively engaging with the course material. The most problematic strategy that many students try instead, he claims, is what he calls “imitation,” and he has discovered it in the math classes he specifically studies. These imitators faithfully copy the problems presented in class, but never understand the conceptual foundations, resulting in them only being able to solve problems that are nearly identical to those presented by the teacher.
He argues that these students are the ones who end up hitting a wall when math lessons move from simpler algebra to more advanced concepts, such as calculus.
“At some point, imitation runs out,” Liljedal says. “And when that happens, students don’t go from A to B, they go from A to D, because they’re not actually learning what they need to learn to be successful.” That’s why so many students go to college and have to redo their first-year calculus courses, he argues.
Liljedahl developed a teaching strategy that significantly improved how many students in the class were actually thinking about the course content. He outlines the strategy in his book.Building a mathematics thinking classroom.”
However, he decided not to try to persuade schools or school systems to adopt his system. Instead, he spreads the word to teachers one by one through this book and by speaking tirelessly at conferences and other educational forums.
And his idea seems to be spreading rapidly. Search YouTube or his TikTok and you’ll see endless videos of teachers sharing examples of employing the approach in their courses. As a result, this book became an unusual bestseller for a title on educational practice, with over 200,000 copies sold and translated into 12 languages.
EdSurge recently connected with Liljedahl to hear what he discovered and learn why what he considers flawed educational practices have persisted for so long.
Several Reddit Discussion Board Educator Liljedal noted that he has not published any research on whether his approach leads to students scoring higher on standardized tests, instead focusing on student participation. However, researchers said they heard from hundreds of teachers who reported improved test scores.
Listen to the episode of apple podcast, cloudy, spotify, stitcher Listen to podcasts anywhere or use the player on this page. Or read the partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: Early in your educational experiments, you tried classrooms with no furniture at all. How did it go?
Peter Lijedahl: Early on in our research, we realized that we needed to break the norm. And it became an obligation. Break the norm and see if it improves your students’ thinking. Is it possible to get more students to think about this? Can we get them to think longer? And we were trying everything.
One of them was to move furniture out of the room. Let’s see what effect it has. It was almost a lark.
When the children come in, there is no furniture. There was no desk, no teacher’s desk, no file cabinet, just empty. And we didn’t expect that much.
Now, here’s the problem. My thinking has improved. The number of students who think for a long time has increased. And it took me a year and a half to understand why.
For those of you listening, I do not recommend taking furniture out. Teachers do not like to teach in unfurnished classrooms. Teachers hated it. And this actually created an interesting tension in the study. Because it was very participatory and collaborative. But one thing I’ve learned is that there’s no point in coming up with solutions that teachers don’t want to implement. We don’t need another social engineering solution that no one wants to do. It must be within reach, achievable, and easy for teachers to engage with.
But at the same time, I’m not going to use their comfort level to limit what we explore. Everything has to work together.
So why did it work?
This actually comes from a theory from the 1970s. This is a theory called systems theory. Therefore, we have to think about all the social situations, all kinds of situations in which we are involved, such as scouts, Brownies, ski clubs, track clubs, book clubs, classrooms, and other places with organizations and structures. . Think of it as a system. So what is a system? A system is a collection of agents and forces.
So who are the agents in the classroom? There are teachers and there are students. Now, what is power? Well, when a teacher exerts force on a student, the student exerts force on the teacher through resistance, obedience, etc. However, students may also add force to each other. And it doesn’t mean that every student applies force to every student. Some students exert force on some students, and so on, but they are not the only agents in the system.
I also had my colleagues promote the system, then parents and administrators, and then the curriculum. So you can see that you have all these agents and they act like nodes. And there are these forces, and they act like edges, pushing against each other. And when all these forces and agents push against each other, eventually the system reaches a point of stability, or a state of rest. It’s like it’s stable and everything is in harmony with each other. That doesn’t mean the powers are gone, they’re still there, but everything seems to balance each other out.
So how do we change the system? The first is that if you try to change the system, it will protect itself because all the forces have reached a point of stability. Now, if you move one of these agents, or introduce a new agent, or increase the force from one of these agents, the system wants to restabilize, and all these forces and Using all agents increases the chance of restabilization to the original state. was.
And this is what I saw in my students in the “learning” behavior I talked about earlier. If a student’s learning behavior is just a habit, he or she will behave that way. And when students walk into a classroom that is similar to other classrooms they have entered, they will evoke the same habits. If you are lazy in this lesson, you will be lazy in that lesson too. In this regard, they are constant.
So they bring these habits into the room and the room rewards it quite a bit because the room has its own power and that power is similar to every other room.
So how do you effect change in the environment in that case? Well, to affect change you have to overwhelm the system. A single force or multiple forces must be applied in such a way as to overwhelm the stability of the system. Therefore, the system must be restabilized to the new form. And when the furniture was removed, it was an overwhelming force. When those students walked into the classroom, it was unlike anything they had seen before. So they left their habits at the door and tried to build new ones in this environment.
While we don’t recommend taking furniture out, there are a series of strategies we recommend for what we call a “thinking classroom.” What are the main aspects?
Well, one of them is workspace. What was your best workspace?
Before we get into that, let me tell you what my worst workspace was. The worst workspace was having students sit down and write in their notebooks. This workspace performed worse than any other workspace on the thinking metric.
What was best? Have students work in groups using vertical whiteboards. However, it doesn’t have to be a whiteboard, just vertical and erasable is sufficient. Therefore, just like windows, the sides of file cabinets also work. …The blackboard worked. It had to be vertical and erasable.
They stood in groups.
why are you standing?
It’s not that standing is very good, it’s that sitting is very bad.
We found that students felt more anonymous when they were seated, and that they felt more anonymous the further away they were from the teacher. And when students feel anonymous, they stop participating. And it is both a conscious act and a subconscious act. And standing up robbed them of their anonymity.
Think back to the last time you went to a professional development workshop. Let’s think about it. You were in this room, sitting, feeling anonymous. And in fact, you may have placed yourself in the last row of this room to feel anonymous and liberated, right? This is not a phenomenon unique to children. This is human nature.
So what was the best way to form groups? Well, it turns out that building groups strategically, as seen in many elementary schools, ended up being a huge failure. It didn’t help to think. Similarly, having students set up their own groups was a dumpster fire and didn’t help with thinking.
The best option was to form groups randomly. And it wasn’t random enough. It had to be visibly random. They had to make sure it was random and needed to change frequently. He re-randomized once every 60-75 minutes.
And any task we gave them had to be a thinking task. Thinking is what you do when you don’t know what to do. If you already know how to do it, it’s more of an exercise than a thinker.
Or busy, someone might call you.
The task of thinking should be something you don’t know how to do. In other words, if you have to think, you’ll get stuck. But that also means you can’t tell them how to do it in advance.
Here is what the thinking classroom looks like. Students work on these thinking tasks by standing in front of the whiteboard in random groups of three and marking each group with one marker.
And that gave birth to the Thinking Classroom. Suddenly, overnight, we went from 20 percent of the students thinking 20 percent of the time to 80 percent of the students thinking 80 percent of the time.
You paint a rather critical picture of common educational practices. What are you doing to spread the word about these issues and your approach?
First of all, building a thinking classroom is not a curriculum. This is pedagogy, a framework to help teachers enact the curriculum they need to work towards. The curriculum is mandatory and the pedagogy is professional. Therefore, this helps teachers to enact the curriculum content that they have to study.
And I respect teachers’ professional autonomy. I believe that teachers should have the professional freedom to decide for themselves what works for them. And if this works for them, I’m trying to support it. I do not want to make this mandatory because I do not believe that making pedagogy mandatory is an effective way to change pedagogy.
And it seems like it grows everywhere. …His prediction of the number of teachers using it in Denmark is 90%. [range]. It is also starting to attract attention in Australia. The book will also be published in Mandarin. It will also be published in Korean, Greek, Turkish, Polish and French. And we’re starting to see this. It’s all an exponential curve at different points in time.
Listen to the full interview, including details about the content of “Thinking Classroom.” On the EdSurge Podcast.
