Detracking with Building Thinking Classrooms series: Cultivate Your Math Community with Non-curricular Tasks

In my final year in the classroom (2021-2022), my team and I detracked pre-algebra using Peter Liljedahl's Building Thinking Classroom techniques. I was asked by Illustrative Mathematics to share our experiences in a blog post after having success with their curricula. This series shares excerpts from that blog post, which can be found here, as well as extra photos and videos from that unforgettable moment in time.

To give support to my fellow educators who are currently deep in the BTC work, I'm sharing the experience here--one part of the system at a time.

Cultivating Your Community to Prepare for the Shift

Non-curricular tasks were integral in our plan to prepare students for the shift in their mathematics learning experience. Toolkit #1 in Building Thinking Classrooms mirrored our goals to create a culture of learning in our pre-algebra class.

• Practice 1: What Types of Tasks We Use in a Thinking Classroom

• Practice 2: How We Form Collaborative Groups in a Thinking Classroom

• Practice 3: Where Students Work in a Thinking Classroom

  
  

We assigned non-curricular tasks to prepare our seventh-grade students for standing while working and collaborating nearly every day for the first two weeks of school. Unbeknownst to them at the time, all 65 students were experiencing elements of the Standards for Mathematical Practice on the first day of class!  Because every student was standing, this posture automatically invited active student engagement in the lesson. They had so much fun learning, trying, debating, failing, and trying again! During our debriefs, we listened as students shared their experiences, mistakes, adjustments, successes, and failures. They were unaware of how much they were reaping the benefits of cooperative learning. We reinforced this regularly for the first two weeks, emphasizing how those moments of trial-and-error, analysis, and more would shape their learning in our thinking classroom.

Listening to and participating in the mathematical discussions provided windows into our students’ capabilities. These group activities created perfect opportunities to informally assess our new students’ levels of the following learner traits:

• conceptual understanding

• comfort level with mental math and computation

• risk-taking

• perseverance

• mimicking or stalling

  
  

Making space for student voice is an essential hallmark of the IM curriculum; through activities like the Math Language Routines, IM positions student voice as paramount to effective mathematical learning. Non-curricular tasks provided a stress-free space to model the curriculum’s expectations by requiring discourse that allowed students to gradually become accustomed to verbally justifying their solutions. Students could also practice the nuances of the 14 Practices without penalty. The intentionality of our tasks, student engagement, and subsequent discussions laid the groundwork for our collaborative learning environment.