You've read the Building Thinking Classroom's book.
You're ready to get started, but need help working through exactly what you're going
to do.
The nitty gritty of setting up a building thinking classroom.
This is for you.
Hello, and welcome to Making Number Sense Makes Sense, a podcast for elementary teachers,
specifically early elementary teachers, looking to really make an impact in the number sense
of their students.
If you're here, I think you've read the Building Thinking Classroom's book and have
heard teachers raving about it and you are ready to get started.
Now, I read this book last year.
I did it for an entire year and I have a previous episode all about my results.
If you're curious about how it worked out, spoiler, it worked out awesome.
But there's lots of little nitty gritty things that you need to think about in order to make
it work in your classroom.
I'm going to share with you those things today.
The first thing you need is a place for your students to work.
Now, if you're in a K to 2 classroom, you're going to want enough spaces for each pair.
If you're in a 3 and above, you're going to need spaces for each trio.
Now, for younger kids, I have had them work in trios before.
If I had an odd number of students or something like that, it did not work as well.
It really didn't.
They're still working on developing group work mentality and having it being able to share
work and space and the marker between three people.
So, two people definitely works best, but it can work with three people.
So, you're going to need to think about the spaces or where they're going to be working.
What vertical non-permanent surfaces are they going to be using and what materials do you
need to gather?
Now, speaking of materials, you're going to need a vertical non-permanent surface.
Now, I was really lucky that school that I was in just got renovated so they did have
whiteboards all over the place.
I realized that is not the case for everyone.
So, what you can use instead is a dry-race sleeve and paper.
Now, their workspace is not as big, but it's definitely something you can use and it can
make shift any corner into a space where they can potentially work.
And overall, the biggest thing is that they're standing.
I did have some spaces that were not vertical.
I just didn't have the area.
It was just a U-table that was flat, but if the kids were sitting down, they did not stick
with it as long as if they were standing up.
So, once they removed the chairs, even though it wasn't vertical, not ideal, it still worked
out.
So, make sure that your surface is non-permanent and that your kids can stand when they are
working.
You'll also need erasers.
Big thing.
Erasers for them.
So, dry-race markers, erasers, vertical non-permanent surface.
I also used magnetic clips to clip the dry-race sleeve so that's something you might want
to consider if you're looking into making your own spaces.
And the last thing that I used is your partner cards.
Now I have these color-coded partner cards that you can get for free at the link below
along with a task that you might want to try.
But when I was randomizing, which brings me to my next step, choose your randomizing method.
Now I used classroom screen for computer-generated partnerships or the partner cards.
I started off with partner cards and the kids definitely preferred picking an actual physical
card than getting a computer-generated partner.
For a while, I think they really secretly thought that I was still picking their partners,
but I definitely wasn't.
But even towards the end, when they understood that I'm not picking it, it just kind of spits
out partnerships, they preferred the card.
So I would suggest using cards.
The next thing you're going to want to do is pick your schedule.
Then are you going to do building thinking classrooms?
I'm not sure if there's a right or a wrong way, but I'm just going to tell you what I
did and how it worked out for me.
So I did my big building thinking classroom task on Mondays.
My reason for Monday is because it was a weird schedule.
I had a double special, so there wasn't a lot of time to get into a full math workshop
or anything like that, but the perfect amount of time to get into a task, give them work
time, give them time to consolidate their learning.
So that just was what worked out for me.
So I did a full building thinking classroom session once a week, and I sprinkled in different
partnership activities throughout the week when we were doing other things.
And that really worked out for the kids to practice the social skills involved with working
in a partnership.
And they came to prefer working in partners versus working on their own.
And I was all right with it.
I'm okay with it.
I prefer them working together, especially working on the social skills, which is so
big for young kids.
And it's something that is really challenging for them.
Now I was a little concerned about, like, how are they learning this?
Like, when they have to do an assessment, they're going to have to work on their own.
They're not going to be able to work with a partner.
I didn't need to have worried because they did fabulous on their assessments, working
on their own.
But I think the experience of having a year full of being really creative thinkers and
listening to other people and gaining other ideas really helped them to be able to take
that and apply it to new situations, especially even if they were working on their own.
So I wouldn't worry too much about that, especially for younger kids.
Their assessments are not as high stakes, especially if you're in the United States
when high stakes testing doesn't really start until third grade.
They're in kindergarten, first grade, second grade.
They don't necessarily need to be so concerned about that.
They won't have to do that.
So I kind of just let that go.
The next thing you're going to want to think about is defining your goals with your students
and how you want your classroom to run.
So you need to picture in your head, if you had a perfect problem solving session, what
would that look like?
So I'll describe to you kind of what I envisioned, and then you might think about how you might
use that for your classroom and how you might tweak it.
So when I thought of the perfect problem solving session, I wanted to see both partners discussing
discussing the problem.
I wanted to see both partners sharing the marker and really listening to each other.
I wanted to see kids who, if for some reason they needed to go to the bathroom, get a drink
of water, they would go do that really quickly and come back, not necessarily needing to
ask for permission, but just kind of go let it be free flowing.
That's not the case for all teachers who want that, but that's kind of what I wanted.
And I wanted them to be really respectful to each other and listen to each other and
understand that your partner might have some valuable input, but also your classmates might
have some valuable input, that your classmates are a great resource for you to use and that
if you are a partner and you noticed another team, another group, looking at your paper
or looking at your, excuse me, whiteboard, that you didn't assume they were trying to
copy you.
You wanted to assume that they were trying to think of an idea from you that might help
them solve their problem.
I also kind of wanted them to be able to flow in and out in a purposeful way.
So what I mean by that is I wanted the kids to be able to, if they were really stuck,
they could ask me, they didn't usually ask me, they preferred to ask another group what
they were doing or kind of how they were solving the problem and they listened better to each
other than they ever did to me for something like that.
So listening to a peer and how they figured it out really supported them in growing their
own thinking.
So I wanted them to have the freedom to be able to move around the room and get ideas
from other kids.
Now, my caveat is it did not start like that.
They started more in their spaces and then once they got the hang of it and understood
that if I'm going somewhere else, it's for support.
It's not to just talk to my friend who's on the other side of the classroom.
That's kind of what I envisioned.
So to make that work, I really needed the kids to practice sharing their marker.
I needed them to practice talking to each other.
I needed them to practice understanding that they had a common goal and working towards
that goal.
So when it came to my tasks, especially my non curricular tasks, that's kind of what my
focus was.
My focus was focus concentrating on one outcome.
Our goal is to do X and we need to work together to make that happen.
My goal for another non curricular task was sharing the marker.
I had them do intervals like you have it for a minute, you have it for a minute.
I didn't love that just because it ended up being more work for me to kind of like set
the timer or make sure that it was working or make sure that they were switching.
I wanted it to be more free flowing.
So I started that way.
So they got kind of a feel of it, but needed to make sure that both of them had the marker.
I also wanted them to practice getting to the right space.
If you've taught kindergarten, you know that especially at the beginning of the year, it's
like herding cats, trying to get the kids to walk in a line.
I'll face the right way.
It's a mess and it requires a lot of practice.
So that was another thing I wanted them to focus on.
I gave them something super engaging to do once they got to their space, but they needed
to make sure that they found their partner and figured out what space they were supposed
to be at.
So I think the task that I used for that was I said, there's a box of blocks in your space.
You need to find the right space and see if you can build the tallest tower that you
can together.
And so they were really motivated to get over there.
They found their partner right away, went to their space and that practice really helped
them get used to how to get started.
So thinking about what you want and what you might see, those are things you want to think
about how you want the classroom to look and how you want it to run and what tasks or what
items you might need to do in order to make that happen.
Speaking of tasks, that was kind of your next step.
Figure out how you want your tasks to work, what access you want kids to have to manipulatives,
how they go about getting them, can they just get anything that they need?
Are you putting stuff out for them?
One of those little things to make it really flow.
And speaking of the non-curriculars, I really feel like the non-curricular tasks job was
to get us in the routine of getting to the right space, working with any partner and
really listening to each other and being a partner.
So those are my first tasks that I did with the kids.
Had those things in mind, really not too much to do with math at all.
And because we laid that groundwork, once we started to get into more curricular tasks,
they had the routine down, they knew what to do, they knew where to go, they knew that
even if this partner was not my best friend that I wanted to really work with, they might
get their best friend next time and it's just for today.
Next time you'll get a new partner, any new partner.
So that's what worked out for me.
Now if you're wanting some ideas for tasks, I will leave below some links to some really
helpful teacher collaboration groups that are working on building thinking classrooms.
I'll also send you a link to a blog post that I did about some of my tasks and kind of how
I go about doing them.
And if you're looking for an example of a free task, you can get that at the description
below as well.
If you have any questions, make sure to send me an email or you can DM me on Instagram.
I am happy to help you and help you talk through what you need to get started for a successful
year of building thinking classrooms.