Teaching and Learning in a Gradeless Thinking Classroom with Graeme Lachance

When I was asked to teach grade 7 math for the first time, I had been working as a special education teacher for a few years, teaching at both the elementary and secondary level. Like anyone would do given a new position, I reached out to the people I would be working with and let them know that I would happily take anything and everything that they could provide. I was lucky. The whole curriculum was mapped out by week, assessments had already been made, many slide decks of notes created. This was a dream come true and meant that I could focus on my classroom management, delivery, and developing student relationships and trust. I had been teaching for five years at that point, and had taught students from age 5 to 18, so I was comfortable at the front of the classroom. But I became bored quickly, and it was evident that the students were too.  It was no shock to me, then, that the traditional way of teaching math was not working for me or my students. The course was laid out by unit, each day planned a month or more in advance and divided by topic. Lessons were structured the same way, every day: Bell ringer problem, correction, 10-20 minute mini-lesson, students take notes on the algorithmic way for solving problems that I wanted them to use, then workbook practice completing upward of 20 different versions of the same question, then if there was time, correction. Rinse and repeat. This Groundhog Day approach to math might be dependable, but it is not inspiring, fun, or challenging. I branched out. Having changed teaching positions so often, I was always one look to current trends and research to inform my practice. A quick search for math education brought me to first to Peter Liljedahl. Dr. Liljedahl is a math education researcher out of the University of British Columbia, Canada, who has been studying math education for decades. He experienced the same feelings toward the traditional way of teaching math as I had, knowing full well that it was not working. He analyzed what was not working, tested changes, published his findings, and recently released the influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning. Prior to the release of his book, however, his research introduced me to rich tasks, where the object isn’t about completing slight variations of the same question ad nauseum, but about presenting students with situations or challenges with layers of complexity. This encourages curiosity, autonomy, and playing with strategies and mistakes.  Searching for these kinds of tasks led me to Twitter and the amazing math teacher community there. I learned about the work of Jo Boaler, who I’ve since taken two of her online Stanford courses from... Continue Reading Here Bio: Graeme is a teacher from Wakefield, Quebec who is constantly questioning assumptions about the education system. He grew up in Montreal, Canada, and completed his Bachelor of Education at McGill University in 2010. From there, his twelve-year career in education has brought diverse teaching experiences, taking him as far as Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to Hull, Quebec. Graeme is principally motivated by bringing about a more human way to learn through grassroots changes to classes, schools, and beyond and providing young people opportunities to develop agency and autonomy. He brings forth approaches backed by research. This year, inspired by the work of Dr. Peter Liljedahl and Dr. Jo Boaler, he has endeavored to introduce a math classroom without grades that prioritize deep thinking instead of rote memorization or blindly following teacher instruction. Twitter: @livingpedagogy