I always have so many mixed feelings about this time of year. We have been on summer break for seven glorious weeks now and have a little less than four weeks left before the school year starts up again. Never has a summer break been more necessary than after the 2020-2021 school year. I get exhausted even thinking about last school year & hope I never have to teach both in-person & via Zoom *
at the same time* ever again. I'm still not sure how we got through it all! As we slowly begin to gear up for the 2021-2022 school year, there are a lot of mixed feelings... more than usual. There is the usual excitement & hope that a new school year brings, but there is also a lot of fear & so many unknowns. We know that the upcoming school year will not be a "typical" school year and we also know it won't be exactly like last school year, which makes planning for the upcoming school year challenging. Something I am grateful for this upcoming year is that I will still have the support of the
MfA community as I begin my second Master Teacher Fellowship. In preparation for the new school year, I read
Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by
Peter Liljedahl, after seeing so much buzz for it on the
MTBoS, and it did not disappoint! So many practical ideas about shifts we can make in our classrooms to support students in thinking about mathematics, all backed up with real classroom experience.
While reading each chapter, I found myself saying "Yes! I need to do this!" After the insanity of last school year (and for the first time in my career, not being totally excited to go back to who knows what last summer, it was nice to be excited about all the ideas in Building Thinking Classrooms, which tie into so many aspects of education that I have always wanted to grow in - from building a classroom environment that is more authentic in doing real mathematics (and more engaging to students), to implementing equitable grading practices that support students in their math learning.
As exciting as it was to read and highlight the heck out of my copy of Building Thinking Classrooms, and tell myself that I am going to 100% jump into this (which is very easy to say when the school year is still 3+ weeks away) I am nervous, that like so many other past ambitious goals for the upcoming school year, it will fizzle out, as the year goes on. The good news is that since I am starting my second MfA fellowship this summer, I hope I can use that to motivate me to blog more on here and share my learning experience, both the successes and challenges in building my thinking classroom this year and hope I can use this space to hold myself accountable in trying new things and not letting this opportunity go.
The Building Thinking Classrooms Framework consists of fourteen factors that have been found to improve thinking in the math classroom (see the image on the right), in that order (1-3, 4-8, 9-11, and then 12-14), with each group being referred to as a toolkit. In order to be thoughtful in my reflection (and not to overwhelm myself) I think I am going to break up each toolkit into a separate blog post.
Lastly, I want to begin to formally think about my 2021-2022 goals.
Sarah Carter of
Math Equals Love recently posted her
2020-2021 goals update and back in January of this year,
I reflected on my own 2020-2021 goals on here. Here are my
2021-2022 goals so far. They are still very much a work in progress, but I decided to make the first four goals the Building Thinking Classrooms toolkits. I am going into my fifteenth year teaching, and like any good teacher, I want to get better at what I do, and I am excited to improve the Building Thinking Classroom practices that I already do, and implement the others. Part of my involvement in MfA this year will also co-facilitating a year-long professional learning team on
formative assessment lessons and the
TRU Framework. I think my goal of building a thinking classroom ties in really well with the TRU Framework and I am really excited to do this work!
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