Inquiry 1 Project Reflection

Before this inquiry project, my only exposure to the Thinking Classroom was very surface level and I'd mainly only heard the term floating around without knowing a lot of details about it. Hence, I thought the inquiry project was a great way to research and learn more about it. I was able to read Peter Liljedahl's book, Building Thinking Classrooms, and learn that there was so much more to the idea of Thinking Classrooms than just working in groups at whiteboards. 

I liked the real world contact aspect of the project because although reading about the Thinking Classroom can give a lot of information and insight, being able to experience it in-person gave a more personal and fresh perspective into how the theory plays out in a real life setting. Since the Thinking Classroom is made to be a framework and not something to copy exactly as written, it was really interesting to learn about the similarities and differences on how different teachers implemented and/or modified the ideas written by Peter Liljedahl. One aspect I found that was very different (but very fascinating) from a traditional math classroom was the assessments in a Thinking Classroom. Perhaps I'll look deeper into assessments and assessment styles in my Inquiry 2 project. 

Additionally, simply from reading about the Thinking Classroom and the reasoning and research behind it, I really liked the concept of a Thinking Classroom, and I also thought it was a fun way to approach math teaching and learning. Thus, I was very surprised by the number of negative responses by students towards the Thinking Classroom implementation. After delving into students' reasoning on why, many of them responded that it was because this style of teaching did not provide them with notes that they could use to study from/with. However, Liljedahl mentions not providing students with notes from the teacher because it causes students to mimic rather than think for themselves, which I agree with. What I'm curious about is that even though the teacher didn't provide notes for the students, given the students are doing many problems each class on the whiteboards, couldn't they write notes from those problems they solved? I discussed the issue about notes with a teacher running a Thinking Classroom and we agreed that students seem to struggle with writing their own (effective) notes (or even knowing that they should be writing their own notes). I'm curious to see if students' opinions will change if they learned how to take notes on their own - maybe using Liljedahl's graphic organizer idea for note-taking will be a useful idea to teach students. 

Overall, I hope to research and learn more in the next Inquiry 2 project!