Instead of Having 1 Teacher, Students Now Have 30

When working on challenging problems, students often cue their thinking from each other.

3 min readMar 10, 2021

Working together and sharing throughout the class

Since implementing thinking classroom methodologies in the classroom, I noticed that my interpretation of “collaboration” has shifted

FROM:

Students working together and sharing their thoughts and work at the end of the class;

TO:

To students working together and sharing throughout the lesson.

The outcomes of the latter have been truly inspiring and have totally shifted my teaching mindset from individual to small group, to the classroom as a whole.

Instead of having 1 teacher, students now have 30

Another key thing that I noticed: “thinking classroom” requires students to continually draw upon what they already have been exposed to in order to push their thinking forward.

Not only does VNPS allow students to engage more quickly and remain immersed in a task for a much longer period of time, in comparison to solving the same problem on paper and pencil, with VNPS, students are able to share their thinking in real-time because random groups are dispersed visibly throughout the periphery of the classroom.

Given this visible working environment, students can, for example, take a simple look around the room to observe what others are doing.

This often creates a spark and allows connection to something in the student schema, and in turn can allow for entry into a task if they are stuck, for example, this can allow students to advance through a “stop-thinking” moment. In other words, the “visibility” can provide a “jumping-off” point for those students that need it.

Another thing, when working on challenging problems, students often cue their thinking from each other; it only takes one representation, model or calculation to spark a connection that solidifies their thinking.

Hence, instead of having 1 teacher, they now have 30.

To be more specific, in a recent proportional reasoning task, we explored connections between representations, and we noticed that students easily transferred their thinking from one context to another when using “thinking classroom”, more than likely because they could see and hear similar “thinking” around them.

This helps them build their conceptual understanding of the problem at hand.

Pushing #thinkingclassroom to the home

There is no question that “thinking classroom” and VNPS require a shift in our mindset, as both educators and students embrace the role of co-learners.

But this concept can be stretched beyond the classroom.

For example, we noticed something really remarkable at a recent community function hosted at our school. We exposed families to the idea of VNPS and prompted students to engage in a math task with their parents.

It was amazing to see the children collaborating with their parents to work through challenging problems. And before we knew it, we were witnessing rich math talk between parents and their children.

We even overheard some comments like “We need to do this at home!”, “Math is so much fun this way!”

There you have it

Some interesting observations and benefits that I’ve noticed thus far in my experiences with the “thinking classroom” model:

Students generally end up working together and sharing their thoughts throughout the lesson as opposed to at the end;
Because of the visibly random group configuration, instead of having 1 teacher, students now have 30
Looks like the “thinking classroom” and VNPS could help with math problem solving at home as well.