Adrian's Top Five

Here are five resources I use to get my students thinking more.

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Every teacher I know desperately wants their students to love learning. It’s easy to get bogged down in standards and curriculum and technology, forgetting our underlying intention that we want our students to be lifelong learners. This term has lost a lot of appeal to me over the years because it’s become trite. 15 years ago, every conference I attended discussed, ad nauseam, instilling a lifelong love of reading or writing or mathematics or any other subject.

I believe that most teachers work hard to provide students with their best pedagogical practices and strive to create positive learning environments. There are no shortcuts in the classroom. Sure, lots of edtech tools claim to make learning easier or more efficient, but students need time to wrestle with content. Technology may present academic content in a user-friendly way, but in the end, tools do not replace good teachers and time. Thinking takes time. Every year, teachers send off their students and hope they grow into upstanding members of society who can think critically and independently. 

Unfortunately, our public education system has heavily invested in standardized curricula and resources in order to stanch pandemic learning loss. The pandemic did not create learning loss; the years of remote learning and social distancing exacerbated an already present problem: public schools don’t promote deep thinking.

Here are five ways I push my students to think more.

1. Document Based Questions

A Document-Based Question is an essay question, which requires students to use historical documents (both primary and secondary sources) to develop a thesis, synthesizing these sources. Sound difficult? It is. In fact, this type of thinking is traditionally reserved only for AP U.S. History students. But I believe that all students can and need to develop high-level critical thinking skills. Students should learn history through investigating primary and secondary source documents from a variety of perspectives. This type of “doing history” teaches students how to investigate primary source documents and how to interact with multiple sources of information. 

This sort of critical historical inquiry can begin in social studies’ classrooms with fifth-grade students. In fact, there are a lot of established theoretical frameworks for teaching historical thinking in elementary classrooms. 

Bonus Resources

• TeachingHistory.org

• Think Like a Historian

These are my go-to historical thinking resources when I’m looking for primary source historical documents to use with my fifth-graders. Stanford also offers incredible professional learning opportunities for teachers.

2. Building Thinking Classrooms

No matter what required mathematics curriculum I’ve used, I have had a growing sense that my students are thinking less and less about mathematics. Yes, I’m teaching the lessons, even designing some pretty cool real-world mathematics learning experiences. However, when I really look around, I notice many students mimicking my own mathematical thinking. They are copying down my notes and repeating what I say during lectures or mini-lessons.

Dr. Peter Liljedahl is a Professor of Mathematics Education in the Faculty of Education, and an associate member in the Department of Mathematics, at Simon Fraser University in Canada. His book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics has pushed me beyond my comfort zone and helped be designing a mathematics classroom where students are regularly thinking about math.

I realize this is a long video, but if you want a good grasp of Liljedahl’s research without reading the book, I recommend it.

3. Question Formulation Technique

How many times have you asked your students, Does anyone have any questions? and no hands go up? Even if you are comfortable with a good amount of wait time, there may only be 1-2 questions, and most likely students are asking to go to the bathroom or the nurse, or when snack time, lunch, or recess will be.

I read Warren Berger’s book The Book of Beautiful Questions: The Powerful Questions that Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead with no intention of incorporating it into my pedagogical practice. I was looking for a way to question the public education system in ways that didn’t shut down other stakeholders.

The more I read and researched, the more I realized that I want my students asking better questions. I’ve since used the QFT process for helping my students generate and improve their questioning. Asking questions is a foundational skill that helps my students better navigate what they are learning.

4. Visual Thinking

At the beginning of each school year, I teach my students a visual vocabulary developed by Dan Roam that helps them tap into their visual minds and allows them to articulate their thinking. I use visual thinking to help me tell better stories, explain complex concepts visually, develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and share insights with my students. Research shows that making ideas visual helps engage students and clarify concepts. This is not about having you or your students improve their artistic ability; rather it is about giving students the confidence to communicate their ideas. Roam explains that if you can draw five shapes (square, circle, triangle, line and blob), then you can draw anything and communicate any idea. The more visual you make your learning experience, the more impact it will have on your students’ learning.

Bonus Resource

• Check out this conversation between Dan Roam and Lisa Kay Solomon

5. Depth and Complexity

I love marginalia! I love writing in books, marking up passages, so that I can return to them later or share with with others. Marginalia makes me a better reader and helps me think deeper about what I read. It makes sense, then, that I want my students to adopt this practice as well. One way I do this is through the use of Depth and Complexity icons. There is a lot of research to support that when students annotate text, it pushes them towards thinking that is similar to professionals/experts. I want my students to go beyond a basic understanding of content. I want them to be critically thinking at a higher level.

There are a lot of resources out there for Depth and Complexity icons. One of my favorites is Byrdseed.TV by Ian Byrd. He has these great video prompts that guide students to create a map of themselves using Depth and Complexity icons. I use this activity at the start of the year to introduce my students to the icons.

If you want more, here is a great slidedeck created by Sarah Pack using ByrdSeed TV and JTaylor resources.

Bonus Resources

If you want to learn more about annotation and its literary, scholarly, civic, and everyday significance across historical and contemporary contexts, you should check out Drs. Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia’s book Annotation.

Here is a great conversation with Dr. Kalir about social annotation and creating an annotated syllabus (which I also tried with my 5th graders this year).

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Have a great week!

— Adrian