Podcast Episode
Episode Description
In this conversation, I chat with Peter Liljedahl to unpack the research behind Building Thinking Classrooms and what it really means to design classrooms where students think deeply.
We explore the conditions that support thinking, from how tasks are introduced and timed to the surprisingly powerful role furniture and physical space play in student engagement. Peter clarifies what productive struggle looks like in action and how to normalize getting stuck. We dig into questioning, including the types of questions students ask and which ones teachers should actually answer, and we reframe homework as a tool for students to check their understanding.
This episode is packed with research-backed insights that invite educators to rethink how they design for thinking every day.
Click here to check out SchoolAI!
Episode Resources
- Check out Peter’s books
- Instagram: @buildingthinkingclassrooms
- X: @pgliljedahl or @BTCthinks
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Thanks to SchoolAI for sponsoring this podcast. If you’ve been thinking about how to bring AI into your classroom in a way that’s safe and supports student learning, I want to tell you about SchoolAI. SchoolAI creates a teacher-moderated, controlled environment where students can engage meaningfully with AI. You decide how the AI guides your students and it never simply gives answers. Your students interactions give you real-time formative assessment data and insights into their learning. This helps you identify who needs more support and who’s ready for an extension, so that you can spend your time on tasks that have the greatest impact. SchoolAI also helps with all those tasks that take up your time, such as leveling text, designing performance tasks, and differentiating assignments. Ready to personalize learning for every student? Sign up at SchoolAI.com I have a link for you all in the show notes and start creating meaningful AI experiences your students will actually benefit from and enjoy.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker and today my guest is Doctor Peter Liljedahl, a former math teacher and current professor of mathematics education. Known for his significant contributions to the fields of mathematics education, particularly in the development of Building Thinking Classrooms with a passion for fostering deep mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills. Peter 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 continues to inspire educators worldwide to create dynamic, thought-provoking learning spaces. I have been a big fan of Peter’s work for quite a while, and I was having a conversation with my very best friend Sarah, and she was telling me about how her son Jack is absolutely loving math because his teacher is using Building Thinking Classrooms, as kind of the foundation for the approach in that math class. And so I decided on a lark to reach out to Peter and see if he would join me for this conversation. And I am just absolutely thrilled to have him on the podcast.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
All right. Well, I am super excited that you agreed to share this time with me. And come on and talk about your work at Building Thinking Classrooms. So can you start by sharing kind of a snapshot of your journey in education, like maybe the moment when you became really curious about how students actually think, or if they’re thinking in math classrooms.
Peter Liljedahl
Oh, yeah. Okay, so, I’m a former high school math teacher. I taught in the Vancouver School District, West coast of Canada. I taught, in high school. There is grade eight through 12. But I didn’t just teach math. I also taught physics and English composition. Oh, wow. So, yeah, I had quite an eclectic teaching, load. Where was that moment? I remember I was teaching and I taught eighth through 12th, so I was teaching, you know, the 13 year olds all the way up to 18 year olds. And I remember there was this kind of defining moment where I had been trying I was working with a group of calculus students. Now, this was this was not AP calculus. This was calculus for students who are not in the AP track. So these are not your top students, but these are the students who realized that, oh, I want to get a leg up on calculus. We don’t need to have calculus to get into university in Canada. But they wanted to get a leg up on it because they had heard it was challenging. And and, you know, these were not the top students. So I was working with them and we were about three months into the school year, and it was an early morning class. So it was an off timetable course. It started at seven oh wow.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Early.
Peter Liljedahl
So they were motivated, but they weren’t the most the, you know, the top students. And I had been working through them really diligently and and methodically and carefully. And there was this moment where I was introducing a new topic, and I thought they can do this. They can do this. We’ve covered every piece of this prior. They can do all of this. So I put a question up on the board and I said okay, turn to the person next to you. So this is long before I was doing anything building in classrooms or like I just said turn to the person next to you. Just talk about how you would start this problem. And nobody moved. They didn’t turn, they didn’t talk. They didn’t, they didn’t engage with it at all. They just stared at me and waited and waited and waited. And for anyone who’s a teacher knows, you know, when you ask students to do something and then they don’t do it, that moment that that the death stare. Right. Like that time just drags so slowly. It could have. It maybe was only 10 or 15 seconds. It felt like 20 minutes. Yeah. But I just stood there and I thought, okay, what am I going to do about this? And I just said, I have to go do some photocopying. And I just walked out of the room and,
Dr. Catlin Tucker
I take yourself out of the equation.
Peter Liljedahl
Yeah. And I was in a portable at the time so I could watch from outside in the parking lot. So I stood outside and I just watched, and they didn’t do anything. They just sat there and waited. And I came in after about five minutes and I said, so has anybody got any ideas? And they just sat there and stared at me and I said, I got to go check on the photocopying. And I walked out again, and I stood in the parking lot for ten minutes. I did nothing, and I came back in and I said, like anything. And they just stared at me and I said, class dismissed. Wow. Well, you know, these are 11th and 12th graders. Day we were before school started, and I just sort of kicked him out of the room and they were shocked. And then I proceeded to teach and we were on a day, one day two schedule. So I taught for two days. I drew a box around this thing I had written on the board, so that it didn’t get erased. I didn’t touch it. I taught for two days. Two days later that came back in. The boards were completely wiped, except for this one question, which was still sitting there on the board, and I said, turn and talk. I got to go do some photocopying. And I went out and I stood in the parking lot for 15 minutes, and eventually they started talking. And after they’d been talking for a while, I came back in and I said anything, and they started to talk to me. They didn’t know what to do. They were they were surprised that I was expecting them to know what to do here. And I realized in that moment that I wasn’t doing them any favors. Right. Like I was really good at explaining things carefully, methodically, lots of visuals. I was a funny teacher, so I was able to woo them with my humor. Right? Like I was. But I wasn’t doing them any favors. They were going to get destroyed when they got to university next year. If they didn’t have the ability to think through just this one simple question, they they were not going to succeed. And in that moment, I realized that I had to start doing something different. And I started tinkering with things like I started getting kids working at their whiteboards, and I started playing with different things. I started doing take home exams and things like this, just to really try to push them into understanding that they gotta they gotta work their way through this stuff. And, and shortly after that, I started my PhD. And that’s when I really don’t get into this journey around how do we get students to think?
Dr. Catlin Tucker
And so, okay, I think when people hear Building Thinking Classrooms and maybe they haven’t read the book or don’t know a ton about it, they might be thinking that it’s like this set of strategies. And I think the thing that I was thinking as I was reading the book is it feels more about like changing conditions so that we can get students thinking, not necessarily about adding a bunch of additional new strategies that, you know, teachers aren’t familiar with. And so you do talk about, like the research and all the variables you test to kind of figure out what leads to thinking in classrooms. And so it was your experience as a teacher that made you want to focus on thinking. And now when you go into classrooms, like what conditions? Like when you go to a classroom, how do you know kids are thinking like, what conditions are you looking for that you’re like, okay, this is a classroom where kids are engaged cognitively in thinking.
Peter Liljedahl
All right. So this is that was a lot of stuff. And I could I could, I could start there was in a lot of different directions. First of all, my story of standing in the parking lot. That was not the inspiration for Building Thinking Classrooms. That was when I realized that something was wrong. Right. And then I went off and I started doing my PhD, and then I got back into classrooms as a researcher, and I was paying attention to what’s actually going on in classrooms. And that’s when I started to realize that students are not actually thinking. So that parking lot incident told me something was wrong. The research later told me that thinking was missing, and that research also revealed to me that environments are largely unchanged from class to class to class, and unchanged from decade to decade to century to century. Right? Like classrooms today look a lot like they did 170 years ago. And what we’re doing in classrooms looks a lot the same as when we were doing 170 years ago. And I started with this premise that is everywhere I go, students are not thinking, and everywhere I go I see these what I call the institutional normative structures. These got to be connected. And if we want to get students to think, then what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to break some of these structures. So that’s what I started to do. I started to do research around how do we break through these institutional normative structures. And and I organize it into 14 variables, things like what kind of tasks do we use? How do we form groups, where should students work? How do we answer questions? How do we assign homework? How do we do notes? How do we formative this formative and summative assessment like I chose these variables. And these variables account for about 95% of what a teacher does on a day to day basis. And I just started exploring. Breaking through these normative structures is taken as true and taken as effective practices that we’ve been enacting for 170 years and, and, and just tearing them down. And then building back up new practices on the assumption that or on the with the goal of trying to get students to think, what emerged were these 14, I call them practices. We can also call them tools, but what they do is they, well, let me say it this way. One of the easiest ways to summarize Building Thinking Classrooms is Building Thinking Classrooms is a collection of the things that we have to do right to get students to think. Because if we do any of them wrong, we actually robs students of our opportunities to think. So. For example, if I if I answer their immediate question when they have a question, I’m robbing of an opportunity to set right. I have to redirect. But it’s more than that. Building Thinking Classrooms is also the things we have to do different to create a structure, to create an environment in which thinking is not only a necessitated, but it’s also supported. One of the first things we learned in our research was it doesn’t matter how good the task is, it doesn’t matter how good that question we’re asking the students to think about is if we change nothing else in the environment, the students are not going to behave different. And that goes back to my personal art incident. I put up a question that was a thinking question. I changed nothing else about that environment. So they changed nothing about their behavior. They sat and they waited for me to tell them how to do it so that they could just mimic that work. Yeah, right. So Building Thinking Classrooms is about how we change the environment and how we do things right.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And okay, so there’s so many pieces of this I cannot wait to unpack with you, but I want to start with the furniture because you said something very early on in thinking classroom building, thinking classrooms about how when students walk into a room and every room kind of looks the same, but then it just mentally kind of sets them up for similar behaviors in each room. So if they’re not thinking over here and they come into another classroom that set up the exact same way, it’s almost like the assumption is I’m just going to continue the behaviors in other classes. And so the discussion of furniture and how it either supports or stifles thinking was a to me, I often talk about like furniture should communicate the task. But then I’m, I’m reading about like the effect on the body when you’re sitting for long periods of time. And it was. So can you share a bit about what you learned in the research about how that physical space impacts thinking? Because it feels like that physical space is almost the first thing you kind of have to deal with.
Peter Liljedahl
Well, this was this was actually one of the questions that I asked myself was, is a classroom without student centered or thinking classroom, right. And it turns out it can be or cannot be. And I’ll give you a really concrete example. So for think about the last professional development session you went to. Right. And I’m talking to the whole audience here. You walk in, all the chairs are there’s tables and chairs, but everything is oriented towards the front. There’s rows and there’s a lectern like a podium and a big screen, and you immediately know what’s coming up. Do you know how to behave? You settle into a seat near the back of the room. You get your computer set up, you get your marking out your grading because you know, you’re ready. You’re ready for the day. You have assumed a whole bunch of things about what’s going to happen, and you have already shifted your behavior to fit that assumption. And the presenter is not even in the room yet. Yeah, true. Right. But if you walk in and there’s round tables and there is manipulatives in the middle of the table and there’s chairs all the way around, there is no lectern. You’re like, okay, this is we’re going to be doing a lot of conversations here and so on. And so the room tells you how to be here. It’s the same for students. And these behaviors these habits we call them student behaviors. Right. Teaching is what teachers do. Student thing is what students do. And you would think that student teaching involves things like learning and seeking to understand. But now most of their behaviors are actually not about that at all, right? They’re about getting through the day, flying under the radar, getting out of there with the least amount of social emotional damage possible, connecting with friends, doing the minimum necessary to get through, and so on and so forth. Right. Like they have their they have their student behaviors. And if they walk into a room that looks exactly the same as they always look, they bring those same behaviors with them. Right? And we actually discovered this in a sort of a lark. Early on in the research, I did this study where it was a micro study, but we we just took all the furniture out of the room to see what effect that would have on students. Now, we didn’t expect it to have a big effect. We just wanted to see what their reaction was be, because a huge part of building, thinking classrooms is about tearing down the norms. It’s about poking the environment with a sharp stick and seeing what effect it has on on behavior. Right? Because it’s really hard to study something that is static. It’s way easier to study something that is in motion. So like doing something radical like that puts things in motion. And now we can start to see what’s happening. We were blown away by the effect of this. Right? Like, yeah, the teacher was unhappy and the students were unhappy, but they behaved completely different. Like, they, they they it’s like they just left all their habits out the door and they walked in and they’re like, okay, this is different. Let’s figure out who I’m going to be in this space. And that revealed a lot to us. So when it came about you know like teachers were not happy teaching in rooms without furniture. Right. Like it’s it’s not it makes no sense coming up with a practice or a tool that has a high effect that nobody is willing to implement. Right. And that was one of the things that was really important about the Building Thinking Classrooms research. It was always done in conversation with teachers. Right? It doesn’t mean it’s not going to push teachers out of their comfort zone, but it’s not going to go places that are non-negotiables, right? Like, what’s the point, right? Finding something that works and nobody is willing to do. Yeah. So when we put the furniture back in the room, the question was what what arrangement of the furniture would actually communicate to students. Start thinking is important and disrupt some of these behaviors that they bring in. And it turned out that the answer was too different to make sure that there was no discernible front in the room.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I love that. Well, and so I was when I, when I read this book the first time, like two years ago, I smiled when I got to that point, because in my last 3 or 4 years teaching full time at the high school level. Also, I remember the day that I was like, get this teacher desk out of here. It’s a bohemian. I don’t want to sit behind it. It creates this weird power structure. I took a kid’s desk. I put wheels on the bottom so I could just, like, scoot around and work with different groups and I remember people would come in with, like, call slips for students and stuff, and they had no idea where I was. And that simple shift of not standing at the front of the room, not having this big, clunky teacher desk the kids had to, like, approach it, change so much of my dynamics with kids. It was so powerful and so simple.
Peter Liljedahl
Right? And what you did there was you disrupted two out of the four ways that a room is front. Right. So there are four things that front a room, where the teacher’s desk is, where the teacher stands, where the projector screen is. Yeah. And which way the students are facing. So like, we can’t eliminate these things, right? Like, we cannot always have a desk. We’re always going to have a projector screen. We’re always going to stand somewhere, and the students are always going to face somewhere. But when all four of those things are all oriented to the same place, right, the teacher’s desk is at the front. The teacher stands at the front, the projector screen is at the front. The students desks all face the front. This is a heavily fronted room, right? Heavily fronted rooms communicate to kids that there is a certain behavior that they’re expected to do, and they’re going to do that behavior. It also creates a really easy place direction for them to project their facade. So the origin of my research with Building Thinking Classrooms was all about getting behind the facade. I wanted to understand what goes on in the classroom and in student thinking. And yes, every teacher who’s listening to this is going, yeah, I get to see students think every day. Yet you do to a degree, but you only get to see what the students show you. Right? There is other things that go on in the classroom. And, and students will project a facade towards a teacher. And when the room is really heavily fronted, it is easy for them to project that facade. And then a lot of things happen behind that facade. Yeah, when it’s diffracted, when we disrupt these four things. Right. So we’re still going to have, we’re going to have a teacher’s desk. We’re going to stand somewhere. The students are going to face some direction. The projector screen is going to be somewhere. But if we create tension between these, if all of these four things are not in the same direction, then we get a different room. The kids don’t know where Twitter point their facade. They behave totally different.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah, it’s so fascinating. And I know teachers listening will be like, well, but I only have the whiteboard in this section of the classroom. And I thought it was fascinating because I think you shared like over time, like there’s fewer and fewer smaller and smaller whiteboards and just kind of one at the front of the room for a lot of teachers. But and I’ve worked with math teachers who do like the laminating of the white posters, like they figure it out. So they’ve got the white board or the white, the the surface is all over, and you even make the point, I think at some point, like use different ones when you’re showing different things or when you’re engaging with the students, which I thought was just that, again, that you’re not going to necessarily like get away with not having a front at sometimes, but just kind of that tension you’re creating, throwing them off.
Peter Liljedahl
Move it.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Around. Yeah.
Peter Liljedahl
There’s always have to be the same.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Right. So your comment about students makes me want to jump to questions. I was quite frankly, stunned. I don’t know what number I would have guessed if somebody said, hey Catlin, how many questions do you think a teacher answers in a day? But like around 400 would not? I don’t think I would have guessed that high, but that’s kind of what you report in the book, anywhere from 2 to 6. It almost sounds like a hundred questions. And you talk about three types of questions that students ask and only one type of question that we should really be answering. And of course, spoiler alert, that is the question they ask least frequently. So I would love for you to talk about this, because I know so many teachers get drained by the questions, but it’s almost like they’re creating this crazy flow of questions by the way we behave when we’re asked the questions. And it’s counterintuitive to thinking, so turn it over to you.
Peter Liljedahl
All right. So there are three types of questions that students ask. Right. So first of all, teachers answer a bucketload of questions and it’s not equally distributed. Let’s be clear on this. Right. You’re a high school teacher. You’re listening to this and you’re like, no, I don’t answer 200 questions. But if you’re a primary teacher and you’re like, I do that by lunch, right? Like it’s it depends on what grade you’re teaching and how much you are accessible in the classroom. If you’re sitting behind your desk, you’re not getting asked a lot of questions. But if you’re rolling around, you’re going to get asked a lot of questions. Now, if you take away, can I go to the bathroom? There’s only three types of questions students ask. So the first one is called a proximity question. All right. So a proximity question is a question students ask. And just because you happen to be close by. All right. So you’re cruising around the room and a student, you get close to students and goes oh hey. Right. Okay. And this one here, do do we have to find one answer or do we have to find all the answer? Right. And and notice here, they didn’t put up their hand. They didn’t walk across the room to ask it. They asked it just because you were close by. Okay. So you answer it and then you move on. But I’m the researcher. So I’m hovering around to see what the student does with this answer. Nine out of ten time. The student does nothing with the answer that you provided. Because it turns out they don’t care what the answer is. Proximity questions don’t have anything to do with the answer. It’s got everything to do with the question. What they’re doing with a proximity question is they’re just showing you that they’re being a good steward. Right. Because the most student thing we can do is ask a question. Yep. And then the most teacher thing we can do is to answer right. And and it and it it’s fits perfectly into this idea of what’s called role theory. Or positioning theory. Right. Like they’re just playing in their position. And interestingly, there is another time when students will ask a proximity question, and that is when they’re about to get caught doing something they shouldn’t be doing. Right. And you can probably relate to this, right? Like, yeah, you see a student, they’re doing something. They seem to be off task. So you start heading over there to intervene. And as soon as you get there they ask you a question. Yeah. And they’re like, right. Listen, I was just wondering, are we are we meant to be doing all of these questions or are we, like, just supposed to keep working until the bell rings, right. Like, and they ask this question and then you answer it because technically what was going on is if they were off task, they were out of position. And the quickest way to get back into position is to do something. Student right, to ask a question. Right. And then everything is right in the world, right? Right. And the number of times that you’ve been fooled by this behavior is just huge. Just like, okay, the second type of question they ask is called a stop thinking question, right? Is this right? Are we doing this right? Are we going in the right direction? Is this going to be on the test? Do we have to learn this right. Like thinking is hard. Yeah. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of work. If you would just answer this question, I could stop thinking, all right, so stop thinking questions. They’re really just trying to get out of the thinking. And students will ask a ton of stop thinking questions. And they ask them a lot in the first moments when you ask them to do something. Yes, right, they often are disguised as clarifying questions. Right? But clarifying questions are serving two purposes one, they’re either stop thinking question to try to get you to do the work for them, or they’re a stalling technique. It’s a way for students to stall because as long as they keep you ask answering questions, they don’t actually have to get to work. Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why we don’t ask for clarifying questions when we launch an activity, because it is endless. The students just want to stop. Yeah. The third type of question is a keep thinking question. I keep thinking question. That student is asking it clearly for the purpose of getting back to work. Right. So they’re coming up and they’re going, all right. So I just have a quick, quick question. We’re doing it for 12. Can we we’re done. Can we move on to 16. And you’re like yeah. Or they’re, they’re asking a clarification not for the purpose of getting out of the thinking, but to get back to the thinking. Right. And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a keep thinking question and a stop thinking question. In fact, the same question might be a stop thinking question or keep thinking question. It really has to do with the intent behind the question and then what the student does with that information, right? Do they ask another question and another one? They’re trying to get you to do the thinking. If you’re partway through answering the question, they’re like, on perfect and they’re heading back to their group. That’s a that’s a keep thinking question. Yeah, yeah. Of those three types, we should only be answering the third time. Right. We should only be answering the the keep thinking question when they ask proximity questions or stop thinking what questions don’t answer. They hate and drive some nuts. But they do get used to it, right. And you’ll see, you’ll see if you start doing that, if you like. After a week or two, though, the student will be asking a question in person next to him and they’re like, dude, she’s not going to answer that right?
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I think we we through the way we behave, we treat we train our kids how to behave. Right? If they ask us questions that are stop thinking, but then put all of the pressure on the teacher to do all this thinking and more explanation, then why would they engage in that challenging cognitive struggle? Right? But I think as they realize our boundary is we will only answer these questions that allow you to keep making progress. Then they do it more naturally and you even have a collection of you came up, your team came up with a group of like statements or ways to respond, because I think also teachers like if I don’t answer questions like, am I doing my job? Am I letting them down? And I might, you know, setting them up to fail or whatever the fear might be? And so there’s all these statements in the book that you can kind of use or reframing kind of questions you can respond to, to redirect.
Peter Liljedahl
Yeah, right. Like what do you think? Is that always true? Right. Have you checked with your partner? Like there’s just they’re all just redirect questions. Yeah. But we learn that they actually the best way to to avoid these is or to not answer them is one is just smile and walk away. Right. So as they ask the question just nod and and go on. Right. Yeah okay. And when they’re done you just go And walk away. And they hate it but they get used to it and you’ll love doing that. And the other one is if one of the best ways to avoid having to answer a stop thinking or a proximity question is to not even allow them to ask it. So when you enter a group, enter with a question. And it completely shifted that, that that dynamic, even if they got their hand up waiting for you to come in, they want to ask you a question, enter with a question. And and that usually disrupts that behavior.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Oh that’s I love that. So I feel like this naturally makes me think about productive struggle, which is a really commonly used phrase in education. But sometimes I feel like it might be a little misunderstood. And so from your perspective, in classrooms where kids are like this, they are really engaged in challenging cognitive tasks. They’re really thinking they’re collaborating with peers. What is productive struggle look like in action? Like what do you feel like you see when they’re engaged in productive struggle? And I know that you in the book, you kind of talk about how we can normalize this idea of kind of getting stuck and then unstuck in a classroom or while learning or thinking, so I’d love for you to speak to that.
Peter Liljedahl
All right. So first of all, I agree productive struggle is hugely misunderstood, right? So and anybody who’s listening who knows what productive struggle is, it’s like, I’m just going to ask you a question isn’t a great productive struggle. It’s awesome. All we have to do is challenge our students and they will productively struggle, right? No, right. If we challenge our students and more likely thing that’s going to happen is they’re going to give up. And the reason for this, and this is where the misunderstanding is, is that productive struggle is a state, not a trait. Okay. So what’s the difference? Right? This is how psychologists talk. So you know when you’re hangry. Yeah. That’s a state. I’ll have to do is feed you. You’ll be fine. Yeah. You know that uncle. You just saw him at Christmas. You know. They are they don’t like kids. They don’t like dogs are always complaining that everyone’s driving too fast. They’re just a grump. That’s a trait okay okay. Productive struggle is a state not a trait. Yes. You have students who are more persistent than others, and. But even the most persistent student will will give up under the wrong circumstances, and even the most vulnerable student will persist under the right circumstances. So what are those circumstances when students meet challenge and they do have to meet challenge on the heels of success, they are more likely to enter into a state of productive struggle than if they meet a challenge. Without prior success, then they’re more likely to give up. So a huge part of this is that when we give students a task, that first task, it doesn’t need to be the thinking task. That first task is about success, and then the extension is about success, and then the extension is about success, and then the next extension is like, okay, here comes the challenge. And you actually hear it in the students when they’re working away in the thinking classroom, they’re working at the whiteboards, and you’re giving them the next task in the next. And all of a sudden you hear here and go, oh, okay. Like, here it is. This is the one we’ve been waiting for. Yeah, right. But now they’re so hopped up on with confidence because they’ve had so many successes that they’re just they roll up their sleeves and they dig in and there’s that productive struggle. Right. And they’re going to get stuck. Like, this is the thing that we have to accept and they’re going to get frustrated. But there are two types of frustration. There’s what I call hopeless frustration. This is at, this sucks. Math sucks, I suck, right? That sort of. There’s no way we’re getting out of this. Yeah. And then there’s hopeful frustration, which is like, oh, this is hard. I want to okay, let’s let’s go for it. Right. Hopeful frustration. That’s productive struggle. Right. They’re going to get stuck. They’re going to get frustrated. But that’s okay because being stuck and being frustrated these are these are normal noble places to be. Right. And and students need to just get used to the fact that being stuck is is is a totally acceptable place. Right. And and what happens with this? There’s a really interesting byproduct when you give tasks where everybody gets stuck, people start to feel safer. And because, you know, the worst experience for a student is to be sitting in a classroom where they’re stuck and everyone else is getting it.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Right.
Peter Liljedahl
Because they just feel they there’s so much self doubt and low self-esteem and self-loathing that comes with that. Right? But what if you’re stuck and everybody is stuck and you’re like, well, you don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. This is my wheelhouse. Let me come on. Let me show you around. Take this back. Right now, everyone is stuck at levels of playing field. We’re all stuck, but not that hopeless. Like frustrated, stuck. It’s like we’re stuck. But we’re going to get through this.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Well, and what I love about that is first of all learning is messy right. You’re going to get stuck. You’re going to get unstuck. And you talk about because you have these groups around the room like groups of three for a secondary or whatever. And they’re in if they’re in this place of being stuck, it’s like they’re not stuck at their desk by themselves either. They have their little team. If their little team get stuck, there’s like other people around them. They can have conversations. And so it does become this communal endeavor to kind of like figure it out and get playful. I think with with questions, which I don’t think we see in math classrooms very often.
Peter Liljedahl
So what I would say is that the smartest person in the room is the room. And what our job is, is to get that, that knowledge moving around the room. All the knowledge is there, right? So when a group is stuck, look at the group next to you. Talk to the group on the other side. We call this mobilizing knowledge, right. Like how do we move the knowledge that’s in the room around the room. And and then they will get unstuck. And you’re right, it’s collective. It’s communal. It’s it’s we share in this. Yeah. And the duty of that is if a group is the room is stuck and my job is not to leave them floundering, it’s to give them a hand. So I give one group a hint, and then you just stand back and watch how this knowledge moves around the room. So everyone can get moving right.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah. But I think you’re saying some things that I think are hard for teachers. Right. Because I can see when I was reading I was like oh I can see teachers who are like well I don’t want them figuring it out together. How will I know if this one person knows that if they’re just talking to this group over here? And I think we sometimes, like, lose sight of these realities and education that, like you, so rarely in life are you just figuring things out on your own, like you’re leaning on resources, you’re having conversations. And I feel like this just normalizes that natural kind of social part of learning in a way that’s exciting.
Peter Liljedahl
And when people feel like that, and I think that’s a perfectly healthy and normal way to feel as a teacher. And we worry about that because so much of our job is about assessing students individually. But what we have to understand is that there’s a difference between learning and learn it. Right. So this is a learning environment. They’re learning. They’re supposed to not know. They’re supposed to find things out. And and they are supposed to to learn. And if they’re only person they’re learning from in the room is me, then I’m hopelessly outnumbered. Right? So they got to be learning from each other as well, right? It’s a learning environment when it comes to assessing, which is important. And we need to assess the individual understanding. That’s where we’re looking at who has learned it and who now knows it, and who can show me that they know it. Right. But in terms of the the the business of learning, we need to mobilize the knowledge in the room when we get down to the business of assessing. Right? Yeah. There are moments where we’re going to now have to assess individual learning and understanding. But in the business of learning, like like let’s learn together.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah I yeah, I love that. And so within this kind of design how do you how can you explain how we support students and also starting to monitor their own understanding. Right. Really appreciating what they’re learning in these moments.
Peter Liljedahl
So the first shift that’s happening here is a subtle right. The the what’s happening in the classroom is that the goal, that moment to moment goal is to learn and to use each other to learn and as opposed to to perform right in normative classrooms. Then moment to moment goal is performance. It’s I got to absorb so I can perform, perform, perform, perform, perform is very discrete. Performance only happens at the moments where grades are on the line. Learning is something that happens continuously, right? So there’s this subtle shift that’s happening in the ethos within the room, right? So when that shift happens, students start to actually care about whether or not they are learning and whether or not they understand. So you actually start to hear conversations like, hold on. Whoa, wait a minute. I didn’t get that. What were you doing there? How do we do? Okay, let me try the next one. Right. Like you’re starting to hear those conversations because what’s happening is the students are shifting from being accountable to the teacher and the grades and the curriculum to being responsible for their own learning. So that shift is happening. And along with that, we have to now provide opportunities for them to self-assess. Right. And and this is where a retooled version of homework comes in. So homework has classically classically been seen as an accountability measure. Right. It’s it’s and it comes from a whole bunch of places. Some of them are actually really good. Some of them are not so great. But one of the good places is this idea that we need students to do some work individually because they need to know, they need to have an opportunity to check whether they understand things or not. So this is actually what what teacher said to us right when I asked him why do you have students do homework. They said well I want them to be able to check their understanding. We interviewed hundreds of students. Not one of them said homework is a way for me to check my understanding, not one. Right? They said homework is is for grades. I do homework for the teacher or for my parents. Not one of them said anything to do with homework is being connected to learning or understanding or self assessment. So one of the big shifts we made was let’s rebrand this. Let’s stop calling it homework and start calling it check your understanding questions. Let’s call it what we want it to be. We want it to be a way for you to check your understanding. And and now we’re going to have to shift some behaviors around this. We’re going to start grading it. We’re going to stop. Yes. Collecting it. It’s got to be by students for students. But we’re going to set up the environment in which they want to do it. They’re doing it and they’re getting feedback on it. And we see massive shifts in the way the students engage in check your understanding questions over how they engage in homework.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Which is so fascinating because I think the big fear is if I don’t grade it, they won’t do it. And you were like, actually grading it is detrimental.
Peter Liljedahl
Yeah, I know there’s like the research which is so full of these ironies, these things that we assumed were true and then turned out not to be true at all. And one of them, which is this, that we need to grade things in order for students to do it, and nothing in our data supports that. In fact, it was quite the opposite when we graded. It becomes an extrinsic motivation. When we don’t. It’s an intrinsic motivation. Here’s here’s a newsflash. Turns out kids care about themselves much more than they care about you, right? Like it’s so it’s it’s these sorts of things that are these ironies that are playing out in this research all the time.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah. So I want to talk about tasks because they’re so important. And the, the you have a whole chapter that’s focused on the when the where the how of tasks. And I, I was so I just like fascinated about the impact of the timing. When a task is introduced around like how it is presented and the big impacts those can have on the students willingness or like, you know, ability to like lean into the thinking. So I would love for you to talk us through some of what you learned in the research about how we can maximize the impact, the effectiveness of a task to kind of stimulate thinking.
Peter Liljedahl
All right. So let’s talk about that okay. All right. So first of all, let’s talk about how okay, we’ll talk about when and where in a minute. But let’s talk about how. So one of the things we did in our research was we looked we took the same task and we presented it in multiple different ways. Now it turns out that there are three main ways that teachers will will transmit a task from themselves to students. And so they’ll write it on the board or projector on the screen. We consider that to say, yeah, they’ll put it on paper as a worksheet or as a handout. Those are the same. Or they’ll have them turn to page 47 in the textbook and do question number seven. All right. So we we tested this okay. These three main methods right on the board or on the screen on paper or in the textbook. Same task, exactly the same task. Which of those do you think suck the most?
Dr. Catlin Tucker
I know the answer because I read it, but it didn’t surprise me.
Peter Liljedahl
I think everybody knows the answer. Everybody knows it’s the textbook. Yeah, right. Because a textbook comes with a whole bunch of baggage, right? Textbook questions are questions that students are asked to do after they’ve been shown how to do it. So the same task written on the board doesn’t come with that same baggage. Right. It’s a funny thing. Right? And we we actually did a longitudinal study where we had students for three months. We had them doing every single task they did was out of the textbook. We just didn’t tell them it was out of the textbook. We just wrote them up on the board or projected them on the screen. And this one, and they were amazing. They’re working at the whiteboards. We, we had like, they were just killing it, right. And then three months into it, we came in and we said, your first task today is on page 153. You’re going to do question nine. And immediately all of a sudden every group had their handout. We hadn’t seen a hand up in two and a half months. Right. And we’re like, what’s going on? This is what you didn’t show us how to do this right. Like it triggers that sort of you didn’t show us how to do this response. Right. And every teacher knows this. They kids have come out, come in forever going while I did all the homework except for question seven, because you didn’t show us how to do it. Right. Like it’s there’s that feeling, right? Likewise, anytime you put it on paper, it triggers a worksheet response. Now what’s the worksheet response that is getting done right? Like the goal of a worksheet is to get her done. It’s not about learning. It’s not about anything else. It’s just get it done. Divide and conquer, cheat, copy, whatever you have to do but get her done. And again, it’s not the same bag just when we write it on the board. Interestingly, none of these were optimal. What was optimal was giving the task verbally. Right? So that doesn’t mean we’re not going to write things on the board. We’re going to still write information. We still going to model on the board. We’re still going to put symbols and things on the board, but we’re not writing out the instructions on the board. Those are given verbally. Right. And now that are absolutely massive transformation, right. One of our data points on this is there’s this there’s this task that we use. It’s just this amazing task. It’s called tax collector. And if you know, you know, right. Like if you know this task, it’s an amazing task when we give it verbally, kids are engaged immediately. We send them to the board. They are working right away. And within 30s we will hear one group say, I think we should start with a Prime member. Now, not every group is going to say that, but at least one group was it. When we give a textually they hate it. Right. It’s a half a page. It’s two paragraphs of instructions to get them going on this task. It takes, it takes between 12 and 15 minutes before we hear any group say, I think we should start with a prime number. Right. Text is a very if we just give it verbally with our modeling, they get going. Right. And this this was true for every grade, every subject, even in classrooms with high language learner population.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah. Which is fascinating. And you did I feel like you said to something like, you give the task verbally, which I was kind of like, this makes sense. It’s almost like that tapping into that storytelling. Like you have to kind of stay engaged, but then all the like, actual detail, fact information they needed to solve the scenario or the task was on the board.
Peter Liljedahl
Right? We’re trying to decrease cognitive load, not increase it. I don’t want you to memorize that. It was 187in.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Right.
Peter Liljedahl
All right. That on the board. Yeah. Right. But I want you to and I don’t need to remember, this table of values. I’ll give it to you. But what you’re going to do with it, I’m going to tell you, I want you to plot it. I want you to draw the line of best fit. Like I’m going to tell you the instructions. Right? So that’s how when. So what? Our research showed where it’s from. The moment you start talking to the time the kids are at the whiteboards working on the wrong. You got five minutes. That’s it. Five minutes. And there was a whole bunch of reasons for this, one of which is the more we talk the more we give it away. Right. So we’re sucking the thinking out of it before we talk too much. A second reason is that the transition from being a passive receiver of knowledge to an active creator of knowledge is an uphill transition, right? It’s more work, and the more passive we make them, that’s the bigger this uphill battle becomes, right? Like the steeper that uphill climb is. Yeah. So the longer you talk, the more passive they become and the harder it is for them to transition. And there comes a point, right, that you have now, like in it’s about 22 minutes when you have talked them into complete submission like they had, they got nothing for you now like you talked for 22 minutes. You send in the whiteboards, they got nothing. They’re just done. Yeah. Right. So five minutes, we got to get them to the boards in five minutes, which seems daunting for teachers. Like I have so much to tell them. No, you don’t actually. But as teachers we tend to talk until we’ve prepared them to do the last question on the homework. Right. And we’ll talk and talk and talk and talk. And I’m thinking classroom. We don’t do that. We just talk long enough to get them to be able to do the first question in the sequence of tasks that we want them to do in their groups, right? We just want them to get going, and then they’re going to learn something. In the first question that’s going to help them do the second, and they’re going to learn something that it’s going to help them do the third. And we’re going to mobilize knowledge. And if at some point they’re starting, we need to step in and give a hand, we do that, or if there’s more information needed, we’ll step in and give them that more information. We can always say more later. We can’t unsay all of the things that we put in the front end of the lesson. Yeah, right. So we want to shift from what Julie Dickson calls just in case to just in time. Okay. So we want to we as teachers where we want to do just in case just in case you see this, let me do one of those. And just in case you see this, let me do one of those. And just in case you see this, let me do one of those. And we did just in case, just in case and just in case. Right. Like in the kids are just overwhelmed and they’re tuned out like you’re doing awesome. You’re like four points up there, but the kids are not getting. Yeah. Not okay. How to do just in just in time instead. So that’s the win. And and now comes the where. And this one I think is the one that I think that giving task verbally shocks teachers the most. The second most shocking thing is that we want to give it to them. When the kids are on their feet, we want to get them on their feet into a huddle close to us at a whiteboard or around a table. We want to create that huddle. We want them on their feet. Because kids don’t listen when they’re sitting. I think their ears are vented through their butts, right? Like they don’t listen. And we’ve trained them to not listen because we’re going to repeat ourselves eight times. Totally. And then we’re going to go and give a custom set of instructions to the students who still didn’t listen. Right. Plus when they’re sitting they feel anonymous. And when they feel anonymous they disengage. So get them on their feet. It feels more important. Get them close. Now we’re equalizing power. It feels like a huddle. It feels special. Now we tell them what it is we want them to do. And then we send them off to the whiteboards to do it. So it’s we want to get them on their feet.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah, yeah I yeah the, the whole like psychology of them sitting and what’s happening for them as I read this book just it made so much sense because I had so many moments in my own English classroom where instead of annotating at a seat on paper, I instead of me being at the front, I would project the text on the whiteboard and I would let them do it with the whiteboard markers because he just like to use them. And then they’re standing there talking. And I didn’t realize all of the other underpinning things that were happening. But I just really resonated that that simple shift like, to your point, they’re not as anonymous and even like the cell phone. I know we’re banning it in lots of states and schools and things, but that stat again, about like 50% of students would check their cell phones when sitting and less than 10% when they were standing and working at these surfaces. I was just like, so fascinating. All these shifts, like.
Peter Liljedahl
Right. And so I said earlier, Building Thinking Classrooms is about what are the things we have to do, right? But it’s also about what are the things we have to avoid doing wrong. So it doesn’t matter how good the task is, and it doesn’t matter if we only talk for five minutes, and it doesn’t matter if we’re verbal, because if they’re sitting, it’s not working. Right. So we have to avoid doing that thing that’s wrong. We have to get the right thing is get them on their feet. And like, I know it scares teachers lately. I just finally got them to sit still. Now you want me to get them out of their seat, right? Like, yeah, I yeah.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
But I think we it’s funny because I wrote a comment when I first read the book that was like, why do we forget the needs of the human body so often in classrooms? Because so much of that is what I was thinking as I was thinking about how disruptive in a positive way so many of these little tiny shifts can be.
Peter Liljedahl
Yeah, yeah. But I don’t think I think we forget, but I don’t think it’s so much our forgetting. It’s a system as forgotten, right? We’re enacting and reenacting the system because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. And that’s what we expected to do. Yeah. And the system was never designed for this. Right. Like, what we have to understand is that 150 years ago, at the dawn of public education, the systems that were laid down were about conformity and compliance, right? We were making factory workers. We weren’t making thinkers. Yeah, right. Our goals are different now. The goals of education are radically changed in the last hundred and 50 years. There’s no way we can achieve those goals using practices that were designed for conformity and compliance. Need practices.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Well, and especially, I mean, I know you wrote this. It’s been a minute, but like now I’m thinking about this world is a all these AI conversations. And I’m like, the best thing we can teach them to do is learn how to think. That’s the best gift we can give them in this moment.
Peter Liljedahl
Yeah. And how to, you know, be critical consumers of information.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yes, yes. Absolutely. Okay. So there’s a million things I wanted to ask you that we didn’t get to you. I feel like I could talk to you for hours. This is so fascinating. But I always end the podcast by inviting my guests to share, since it’s called The Balance. Anything that you do in your life, whether it’s a routine or, a strategy, mindset, tip, etc. that helps you kind of strive for a healthier work-life balance.
Peter Liljedahl
Okay, so like I’m the worst person to ask about healthy work-life balance. I just we were home not very much last year. A lot of travel building things in classrooms have become popular all over the world. So, I’ve spent a lot of time on the road. Yeah. And there’s a lot of demand for my time. And I have a tough time saying no. So I’m not the best at this. But I will say this, if you’re enjoying what you’re doing it like, you feel like you’re in balance all the time, right? When you’re enjoying the work, the balance is there because you’re you’re living the thing that you feel you should be doing. And and so that I never feel out of balance. I feel dizzy, but I don’t feel out of balance.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
I love that, I love that well, I’m so grateful you said yes to me. This was such a fascinating conversation. I cannot recommend your work more highly than I do. I will include all of the links to the show notes for folks who want to check it out as well. And just I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday break.
Peter Liljedahl
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Yeah me too. This is one of those conversations that I wish could have gone on for another 2 or 3 hours. It is just so enjoyable to talk with somebody who is just so rich in information, right? So much of the book Building Thinking Classrooms in mathematics is grounded in Peter’s research, and yet the book is so readable. It’s fascinating. The way it’s written is just so user friendly. And even as somebody who comes from an English background, so much of what is written about in the book around the condition, students need to think how we design tasks to encourage thinking, ways in which to handle everything from answering questions to arranging the room, to thinking about homework, to engaging kids in self-assessment, to reimagining our traditional approaches to some ways in which we assess learning with absolutely fascinating, no matter what subject or grade level you teach, I really cannot recommend the book more highly, and I think the things that I’m thinking about are the things that resonate for me in this conversation is just how many of the structures, whether it is physical structures or curricular structures that actually impede thinking, and how important it is for educators to consider different ways of approaching everything from the way in which they lay out their classroom and use that space to the ways in which kids engage with tasks, you know, on their feet at whiteboards or laminated posters or windows or, you know, desks that are up on their side, that kids are writing on. I know so much of this feels unfamiliar. It may make teachers nervous when it comes to kind of the chaos of it all, or not having the control or not having neat, tidy answers. Because maybe we’re giving students tasks that are more open ended, like there’s lots of different ways to approach. It may be lots of different, solutions to a particular type of problem. And so what I keep thinking is, you know, this moment when Peter said in his research was always just about poking holes in, kind of seeing what effect it had when we poked holes in these traditional ways of approaching teaching and learning. And I think so often in my own work, when I share different ways to do things, there’s immediate pushback. I get a lot of butts or, you know, what ifs or that I’m scared of X, Y, or Z. But if our goal in education is truly to cultivate thinkers and as we said at the very end of the podcast, I think in a world where the AI conversations are really changing, kind of what is it that students need to walk away from school being able to do at the heart of that is to be thinkers, to be lifelong curious learners. And if we can, if we’re willing to kind of go outside of our comfort zone to try some of the strategies that Peter has found based on research that work to encourage thinking in classrooms, I think we can give students a much more engaging, enriching experience that will arm them with the skills they need to be successful in a rapidly changing world that is really different from the world that traditional education, traditional structures and systems in education were preparing students for. So again, I cannot recommend Peter’s books and his work more highly. I am so grateful for the conversation. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Any feedback? You can find me on Instagram at @CatlinTucker, on X at @Catlin_Tucker, or on my website, CatlinTucker.com. And if you want to connect with Peter, I will include all of his links in the show notes, as well as the links to his books. As always, I want to thank you guys for joining me for this episode. I appreciate you being here, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
Dr. Catlin Tucker
Differentiation is essential, but understanding what every student needs in the moment. That’s the hard part. SchoolAI can help students work with their own AI guide on personalized learning experiences that you design and can monitor. As students interact, you get real-time formative data, not just grades, but insights into their thinking, their misconceptions, and where they need you most. SchoolAI also handles practical work that takes up your time leveling texts, creating performance tasks, and differentiating instruction without creating 30 versions of everything. It’s a safe, contained environment that works, ready to make differentiation more doable. Sign up at SchoolAI.com. I’ve included a link in the show notes and start giving every student a personalized support they need. Thanks to SchoolAI for sponsoring this episode.
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