Making Time to Show Student Thinking

You glance at the clock and realize that there’s only 1 minute left before you are supposed to start the debrief. You look at the board and notice that it is completely blank with no student work to debrief. In a rush, you pull up prewritten student answers and prepare for an amazing and engaging debrief.

As you begin to tell the students to switch to a different color, you take a quick look around the room. A few students glance up at the board, quickly check their answers, and then put their heads back down.

Other groups who hadn’t made it past question 2 are now simply copying down the work that just appeared. The moment they have been waiting for has finally arrived.

The right answers are on the board.

Without meaning to, we’ve taught our students that if they wait long enough, the correct answers will show up. The good news? If this is what we’ve taught them, we can still unteach it. But to do that, we need to make sure students are given opportunities to show their thinking and showcase the work they have done.

So here’s the big question: How do we make sure students’ work and strategies are central to the debrief, while keeping our lesson on pace?

While there is not one “right” way to do this, we do have four recommendations that help keep the process as efficient as possible.

Students Choose

One very simple idea is to communicate at the launch of the Activity that every group is responsible for putting up one answer on the board, sometime before the time allotted to the Activity is over. A lesson timer is helpful here, so students know when the debrief is going to start. Hand out a whiteboard marker to each group, and let them know they are free to choose whichever question they want to put up on the board. If there are more questions than groups, encourage some groups to put up a couple answers, or establish a routine where the expectation is that all questions are completed by the time the debrief starts, so some groups will have to put up more than one. The biggest advantage to this is that students can feel confident about the work they put up, because they got to choose the question. Additionally, you can focus on monitoring groups and know that student work will be ready to go by the time you start the debrief. This is a great strategy to try if you’re first starting out. If you’ve been doing EFFL lessons for a while and are ready to amp up your debrief, might we recommend…

The Cherry Pick

Some lessons benefit from more intentional teacher decisions about what work goes up on the board. One reason might be that you want to highlight a common misconception so you can discuss it as a class. Another reason might be that you see a response that you really love, and you want to make sure it gets shared with the whole class.

If we see a response that we believe will enrich our debrief, on the spot, we ask the group to go write their answer up for that specific question. Remember, we don’t need to wait for a group to fully finish the Activity to get it on the board.

However, this doesn’t mean that we find a group for question 1, then someone for question 2, and so on in order. If we want to showcase all of our students’ thinking, we need to be strategic! We want to save the initial low-floor questions for some of our groups who may not have the confidence of those who work quicker, and we want to reserve the high-ceiling questions for those who are progressing quickly.

So what order do the questions go up?

We start with a middle ground and look for groups that are working at an average speed, having them fill in some of our middle questions (such as 4 and 5). While those groups are writing, our confident groups work ahead, and our less confident groups gain traction by making it through the initial questions. This means once we have those middle questions up, we can have a less confident group fill in the initial questions, followed by our faster groups who have now had time to get to those high-ceiling questions. Since questions are being filled as we go, we know the work will be ready for us to debrief as soon as the allotted time is up.

While all the work on the board is important, we want to highlight the great thinking from those first couple of groups, helping them see that they were successful in the activity. Throughout the year, this builds their confidence and sense of belonging, making them feel connected to what is happening in the class.

To guide the debrief, keep a handful of prompt questions in your back pocket. These help draw out the key ideas from students’ thinking without simply talking through the work that is already there. They are especially helpful for engaging groups whose work is not currently being discussed, encouraging them to attend to the ideas of others.

• “How did this group think about the problem?”

• “Without saying if you agree or disagree, can someone explain this group’s method based on the work you see?

•  “Who can add on to something that is already on the board?”

• “Is there anything we’d like to change or revise?”

If you’ve built a culture in your classroom where students are comfortable making mistakes, they understand that every answer on the board might not be perfect. Because of that, they are less inclined to simply copy down whatever they see.

The Quick Scan Method

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions of trying to get students to put up their answers, we may find ourselves getting wrapped up in conversations with individual groups  and then realizing that we should have begun sending students to the board 5 minutes ago.

If you are teaching with an electronic board or projector, technology works wonders in getting student work from paper to board with minimal friction and hardly any time. One of our favorite hacks is to use a document camera or a document scanner from our cell phone or iPad (Genius Scan is a great option, but the one built into Google Drive has come a long way!).

Once we have the group’s work we want to showcase, we pick a member of the group and scan their paper as a PDF. Here is what our sequence would look like:

• Open Google Drive on our phone

• Click add (the “+” sign)

• Select scan

• Open the pdf from your Google Drive on our board or computer

You are now instantly ready to begin annotating over the student work.

We’ve always been huge fans of comparing different methods and ideas from various groups. Traditionally, if a student writes their work on the board, we can acknowledge what they did and then ask the class whether any group tried a different approach. However, the challenge is that this second group is verbally telling us what they did, and we cannot visually see their solution and how it differs from the work already on the board.

Scanning actually goes a step further than “The Cherry Pick” in allowing us to show multiple groups’ work not only for different questions, but also for the same question. You might reference one student’s paper for question 1, but then switch to another student’s paper to show their version if they approached it differently. By taking scans from each group, you can have them discuss their approaches while displaying their work for the entire class to see.

Using Vertical Whiteboards

If you are familiar with the book Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl (BTC), you have probably already thought about having students work on whiteboards around the room. Whether you do multiple BTC practices or just this one, having students work at vertical whiteboards through the activity means that their answers are already on display when the debrief starts.

We recommend setting up different stations around the room where students can work on a fairly large surface. Provide some magnetic binder clips so they can attach the activity to the board, and give them a single marker in any color EXCEPT the one you will be debriefing in (we recommend saving red for yourself!).

When beginning this method, teach your students this process:

• Attach the activity to the whiteboard (magnetic clips work great!)

• Write your solutions with dry erase marker (big enough to be visible across the room!)

• Select another group to see if you agree with each other’s answers- revise your thinking as needed.

• All group members copy down the whiteboard work to their paper in pencil.

This approach also makes the activity efficient because if groups get stuck, there are numerous examples around the room they can reference to figure out what other groups are doing. Split up groups that finish and send them to those that are not finished to offer help (we talk about being truly, but not overly, helpful when consulting with their peers). This creates a class initiative to complete the activity. As groups work, circulate and put a small star next to board work you want to highlight in the debrief. If you have a particular sequence in mind, number the boards instead so you know the order you’ll visit them.

Now, enter debrief mode, grab your red Expo marker, and return to the groups whose work you starred while circulating. Begin adding your margin notes right on the whiteboard with the student work. As you add these elements in red, students can also add them to their papers. Showcase various groups’ board work to demonstrate the connections that exist between methods and ideas.

Back to the Clock

You glance at the clock and realize that there’s only 1 minute left before you begin the debrief. Looking at the board, you smile as you see it’s already full. Questions 4 and 5 went up first, the early finishers took care of 6 and 7, and a group that usually stays quiet just finished writing up question 1, smiling as they walk back to their seats after being chosen to write on the board.

As you tell the students to switch to a different color, you take a quick look around the room. This time, heads aren’t down. Students are looking at the board, trying to find their own work. Another group is pointing out that their approach to question 3 was different and trying to figure out why the other method worked.

The moment they have been waiting for is finally here.

Their thinking is on the board.

So if you are currently not having your students show their thinking, we encourage you to pick one of these ideas and give it a go. If we can show student thinking in our classroom, we will see our students grow more confident in their abilities, realizing they have good ideas and are capable of doing math.

In a future blog post, we’ll talk more about how to select and sequence the student work you want shared in the debrief, including what to do during the monitoring phase to help you gather the information you need.