Season 3 | Episode 1 - Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy & Knowledge Transfer - Guest: Dr. Peter Liljedahl

Dr. Peter Liljedahl, Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy & Knowledge Transfer

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 1

We know from research that student collaboration can have a powerful impact on learning. That said, how we group students for collaboration matters — a lot. Today we’re talking with Dr. Peter Liljedahl, author of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics  , about how educators can form productive, collaborative groups in their classrooms.

BIOGRAPHY

Peter Liljedahl is a professor of mathematics education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and author of the best-selling book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K–12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning .

RESOURCES

Building Thinking Classrooms

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Wallus: We know from research that student collaboration can have a powerful impact on learning. That said, how we group students for collaboration matters — a lot. Today we're talking with Dr. Peter Liljedahl, author of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, about how educators can form productive, collaborative groups in their classrooms. 

Hello, Peter. Welcome to the podcast.

Peter Liljedahl: Thanks for having me.

Mike: So, to offer our listeners some background, you've written a book, called Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics , and I think it's fair to say that it's had a pretty profound impact on many educators. In the book, you address 14 different practices. And I'm wondering if you could weigh in on how you weigh the importance of the different practices that you addressed?

Peter: Well, OK, so, first of all, 14 is a big number that publishers don't necessarily like. When we first started talking with Corwin about this, they were very open. But I know if you think about books, if there's going to be a number in the title, the number is usually 3, 5, or 7. It's sometimes 8 — but 14 is a ridiculous number. They can't all be that valuable. 

What's important about the fact that it's 14, is that 14 is the number of core practices that every teacher does. That's not to say that there aren't more or less for some teachers, but these are core routines that we all do. We all use tasks. We all create groups for collaboration. We all have the students work somewhere. We all answer questions. We do homework, we assign notes, we do formative, summative assessment. We do all of these things. We consolidate lessons. We launch lessons. These are sort of the building blocks of what makes our teaching. And through a lot of time in classrooms, I deduced this list of 14. Robert Kaplinsky, in one of his blog posts, actually said that he thinks that that list of 14 probably accounts for 95 percent of what happens in classrooms. And my research was specifically about, how do we enact each <