On Today’s Episode about Strategies for Consolidation:

• Consolidation
• Being a curator
• Learning with your students

Meet Peter Lilijedahl, Author of Building Thinking Classrooms

Peter Liljedahl is an educator and researcher known for his significant contributions to the field of mathematics education, particularly in the development of “Building Thinking Classrooms.” With a passion for fostering deep mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills, Peter Liljedahl has dedicated his career to reshaping classroom environments. His work emphasizes collaborative learning, problem-solving, and student engagement, leading to more effective and meaningful mathematics education experiences. Through his innovative teaching methods and research, Peter Liljedahl continues to inspire educators worldwide to create dynamic and thought-provoking learning spaces.

What is Consolidation?

• Depends on the task 
• Rich task→ exploring and inquiry based thing…vs. Thin slicing sequence → looking for patterns 
• Rich tasks→ divergent tasks
  • Many different ways to solve 
  • Gallery Walk→ Select things students have done at the board, sequence the ideas (easy to hard, common to uncommon, concrete to abstract)
    • Teacher creates a narrative

Why is Consolidation Important?

• They are in thinking creation space 
• Informal ideas 
• These ideas will float away if they are not formalized 
• Why Consolidation: “Our effort to help students turn chaos into order, organize, structure, formalize their thoughts.” 
• Pull on their sense making – tentative knowledge.
  • We’re not lecturing and giving them OUR understanding and ideas. 
  • We’re helping them finish the sense making process

2 Rules:

1. We don’t do all of the steps for 1,2,3. We go with the first step. They are seeing how the steps are the same for all
2. Never finish any of the tasks. It leaves their brains a bit itchy- they want to solve it. Focus on the process but we always get to the answer.

Today’s Key Take Aways 👇🏼

• Use the students work to tell the story – you are the tour guide
• Don’t have students from the group present their own work – have someone from outside of the group explain what they did
• Use students’ conjectures to build the story
• Sheep dogging→ pressuring students into doing it the way the teacher understands
• When students diverge→ become a learner from the students
• We’re all in this thinking thing together. 
• Mine your brain.
• Knowing the math gives you the confidence to improvise as needed. Use the skills to interpret what the students are doing.
• We don’t always have the knowledge necessary
• Students bring things into the classroom from their multi-cultural world that we’ve not encountered
• Routine→ This allows students to practice this everyday. Students who aren’t ready, can observe today and can then jump in the next day.

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

💻 Peter’s website: https://www.peterliljedahl.com/
🛜 Facebook Group – Building Thinking Classrooms
📝 Building a Thinking Classroom in Math (Article on Edutopia by Peter)

📘 Building Thinking Classrooms
📕 Modify your Building Thinking Classroom

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