BCAMT 2022 - Responsibility in the Thinking Classroom - Peter Liljedahl

Research BTC on FB -- Way more! For specific things 

What is a Thinking Classroom?

• Curricular and Non-curricular tasks -- heavily skewed towards curricular
• Not "for enrichment"!
• Place where students work collaboratively in groups of three on VNPS
• Intentionally disrupt order of classroom
• Students find autonomy
• Place where we maintain flow, bring order to the chaos

• Can't do consolidation, etc with cold brains, so if you run out of time and have to do the next day, you need to start with a quick task
• Meaningful notes happens best AFTER consolidation
• Option: The only "homework" is to make meaningful notes at home. 

What Happens in a Thinking Classroom?

• Students think.
• Students collaborate. 
• Even against all odds, collaboration seems to work
• Students find voice and autonomy. 
• The boundaries begin to dissolve.
• Students have pride.
• Profound emergence of empathy. 
• For the first 3 weeks, marginal improvement in collaboration, then BAM! Things explode. 
• Students take care of each other. Students are present.
• If we want our students to be present, we have to stop reminding them of the future.
• You give them a list of questions, you remind them of the future. 
• Agenda of the day
• Timer
• Every kid takes a turn leading. Teacher interrogates. Everyone gets it. 

Responsibility in a Thinking Classroom?

• How is it that students can do it in a group, but not alone? What's the learning gain that happens? 
• Every student has gaps. Varying amounts, but everyone has holes. 
• What happens when we put three slices of Swiss cheese together? The holes cover each other. 
• There's something about collective knowing and doing that is different than individual. It's not that they're just telling each other how to do things, it's that they're taking responsibility for each other's understanding. 
• Collective efficacy.
• Better transference when 7/10/11/13 are in play. 
• Homework
• Consolidation
• Notes
• Formative Assessment

How do we consolidate a lesson? (Consolidate from the bottom)

This is the hardest of the 14 steps!

• Can be a bunch of diff things:
• Conversation - dealing with Big Ideas, let's talk
• I'm going to be a scribe - teacher writes what the students tell them to do (you can't write what you want them to say, or what you think they're saying, have to allow the mistakes to happen)
• Gallery Walk -- MOST EFFECTIVE, most powerful -- honour the work they've done
• Guided gallery walk
• You're in charge, you talk them on the walk
• Part of it:
• Seeding -- plant a seed (if something you want to come out isn't, plant a seed)
• Select -- what do you want to talk about. Kids erase! You have to lock it in. Box it!
• Sequence -- create an order
• What does consolidating do?
• Brings order to the chaos
• Formalizes the informal
• Reifies ideas
• You're entering into the complex space and making the golden thread that connects all the separate ideas together
• In doing so, help students organize thinking
• Marks a transition from collective work to individual work
• First time the teacher is talking to every student in the room as individuals
• Giving you time to try to construct that understanding for yourself
• Tricks:
• Pre-consolidation
• Make a list ahead of time of what you want to see. 
• Mark them off as you see them (#1, #4, etc)
• Have your plan, look for it
• Missing one? Plant a seed! 

How we give notes? (Use meaningful notes)

• Conventional: I write, you write
• Some students get "live notes" when they track, but some get "dead notes" when they fall behind or slide in late
• Minds shut off, not cognitively engaged
• Students lose a sense of importance -- if it's written down, it's important
• We want students to write notes:
• to reference later
• Just put them online! 
• to create memory
• Creates an experience that helps us organize and remember things
• Only true if cognitively engaged in the process
• People don't write notes if they don't care what I'm talking about
• They don't write notes if they think they're going to remember
• When people write notes to themselves, they write to their future forgetful selves
• Write a note to your FFS:
• Graphic Organizers: you can write whatever you want, but you only get to write on one quarter of the paper
• If you only get "this much" it can't all be important
• Graphic Organizers: give them headings
• "hint hint, should probably write something about..."
• Graphic Organizers: global structure (Vocab, BI, Procedures, Examples)

• NEW STUFF:
• 5-stage structure of notes (getting students to get better at meaningful notes) 

1. Split page into two: give you notes on the left-hand side
   Bullet points, worked examples
   ERRORS ON THE PAGE in both the notes and the worked examples
   Their job is to find the errors and write the correct notes on the right-hand side
   - Younger kids: tell them how many errors; Starting out: tell them how many
   - Use cloud thought bubbles, arrows, etc
2. Take away columns - give a structure to build notes around examples
3. Same as stage 2, but "Choose one example"
   It actually doesn't matter which one they choose, but it gets them to think about what is important
4. Blank, but still structure - no prompts, no title
5. Part A: Bullet points, an example to work through, why is this insufficient to carry all the ideas that happened in class today? 
   Part B: Don't provide them with an example, but still have to answer insufficient to carry all ideas

• Different grades will get to different stages 
• Don't let that be your ceiling, but don't feel you need to get to Stage 5 with Grade 8, etc
• Put notes online! Safety net, there if they need them, parents love you. 

What homework looks like? (Give CYU questions)

• Homework is broken. We know that! Why do it? Faint hope. 
• What do you want homework to do? 
• Safe place for students to make and learn from their mistakes. 
• Check to see if they can do on their own what they can do in class. 
• Check their understanding
• No kids say this about the homework they do! 
• Don't assign, give opportunities to do. Don't mark, don't check, it's yours. Rename it: CYU
• "Alone together"
• CYU questions at lunch - twice a week. 
• Students can come in and help out -- Gr 12 tutor
• More questions than are expected to do, they choose

• NEW STUFF:
• Organize questions into columns: Mild, Medium, Spicy
• Who doesn't want to be spicy?!
  
• Choose the ones you want to do, but first have a conversation with your table and decide which ones are the most important ones for you do to. 
• All of a sudden, you have way more students completing questions!

Formative Assessment

• Chapter 13 has great stuff!
• The Sum of It All: Retake BTC
• What have they learned since they finished the initial read-through
• Chapter 13 had the least number of listens -- this is a problem!
• If you do formative assess right, 20% improvement in 60% of students overnight.

Accountability --> Responsibility 

• You can't have both. They will either be accountable to you or responsible for their own learning.