I walked in to our school’s PD planning discussion sometime after our coach unpacked a meeting she attended with “the state people” about improving cognitive demand. The teachers working on our schools PD team has been working to figure out how our school can have more cognitive demand, and it’s close relative ‘higher order thinking’, ever since our graduation rate lagged enough to draw attention from New York State’s education department. With the attention comes a lot of supports, such as having a coach, and having cognitive demand workshops for them to attend, but also comes the fear of not showing continuous improvement. This blog shows that I like learning new teaching strategies, but this year we have to look very closely at potential innovations because “the state” will be watching .

Despite the pressure, we are having inpiring conversations. My coworker shares with me, recapping something the coach shared earlier about student thinking. “Carl have you heard that researchers have tracked the amount of time that students spend thinking in class and it’s something like 30%. The time they spend in class is doing all these other behaviors like stalling, or avoiding, or….” Half way through this sentence I had a flashback to an inspiring moment in a crowded 2018 NCTM conference room. Peter Liljedahl was explaining research that began with him getting into teacher’s classrooms schools looking for ways to figure out how to get students to think, and avoid these non-thinking behaviors. His visits evolved into a set of classroom practices that teachers could try, including types of task, types of classroom setup, even ways of taking notes. This reserach would become a huge hit around the world, and Liljedahl would go on to pack huge ballrooms and see his work featured intenationally, but at that early conference I got a chance to not listen to his talk, meet with him afterwards, and start to try out ideas in my classroom.

I tried explaining all this to my co-worker, but what happened was surely 3 minutes of a verbal firehose. My coworkers were actually very patient as I mansplained my whole relationship with what became the Building Thinking Classroom framework. She stopped me, when I was about to get into ‘thin-slicing’, and asked the question on her mind. “Is this higher-order thinking?” The touch of impatience and urgency behind the query implied that it wasn’t just curiosity about this talk I attended long ago. She wanted to know if these ideas will deliver the kinds of results on the clipboards of potential visitors from the state.

I had to step back for a second to think about my relationship with this framework. I loved the ideas from BTC because it inspired me and changed my teaching until covid changed everything. My teaching is still a work in progress since the pandemic, but that is a post for another time. It would be amazing if I was still getting kids in to groups and managing their flow now, but the reality looks a lot more like traditional teaching then I would want to admit. It has been an uphill battle adjusting to the way kids are showing up in my class, but now it feels like we have to leap up the hill, and make sure the kids go with us. It’s one form of thing to try a new innovation as a part of something that’s growing, it’s another to do that same thing as an escape from falling.

With my word vomit stopped, I paused and responded with some ideas that we could reasonably do in our school. BTC is always a multi-year process and the state supports will only last through next year, so there shouldn’t be any pressure to go faster than necessary. The PD team took some of my ideas and thought about it for humanities subjects, which will be exciting. At an upcoming meeting we will do a staff activity using the same Visibly Random Grouping website that I used 7 years ago (which looks exactly the same!), and will try it in a future meeting.

I wish I was living in the world of my 2018 optimism around BTC and not the worry and fear of this iteration. It’s kind of sad to see this educational framework being discussed as a way to escape outside scrutiny, instead of from an intrinsic desire to help our students think. At the same time, when I came back from that conference I bought whiteboard paper with my own money, begged my co-teachers to try it and wished that my school would embrace these ideas. Perhaps through a monkey’s paw twist of fate we’re getting exactly what I asked for.