Thinking Tasks

 Last week, the kindergarten teachers got a chance to have some professional development with our district math specialist. The focus was to shift our understanding about how typical classrooms should function and incorporate new ideas to build a thinking classroom. As teachers, we had a great time completing thinking tasks during this professional development. It was easy for us to see how much more engaging the day was when we were up writing on vertical surfaces with colleagues from other buildings working through a variety of thinking tasks. We were eager to bring some of these ideas back to the classroom.

We started by randomly assigning partners for the class. This is already a bit outside of the norm as teachers tend to organize groups strategically to ensure cooperation or academic balance. However, the thinking tasks are not always designed to have a correct answer or solution, but to encourage thinking, communication and problem solving. Even if a pair of students struggles with a task there is success and growth in the struggle through thinking and communication.

Now time for the thinking task! Students needed to figure out how many chicken and cows Farmer John had based on only one fact. Farmer John had a total of 22 legs on the farm of chickens and cows. Our first attempt was a definite challenge! Typically, the teacher would model how to complete the task and then the students would follow the same steps given to solve. This time, the students didn't have a model first. They had to think and communicate with their partner to figure out how to solve. In this first attempt, there wasn't any pair that found a possible solution, but after sharing their thinking with the class. They had so many more ideas about how to solve and how they could work through the task.

This week, we tried again! Same concept but slightly different task. We need to find out how many bikes and cars there could be with a total of 14 wheels. It was AWESOME! They took off. Many groups found a solution very quickly with many different strategies. Some groups drew 14 wheels and then divided them by bike and car, some just added up numbers 4 and 2 until they reached 14, some drew cars and bikes counting the wheels as they went. It was so fun to hear the buzz of excitement. And the very best part was that this thinking task wasn't finished with one solution. The partners that found a solution were challenged to find another solution. They were thrilled to continue finding many solutions! I can't wait to try a different type of thinking task soon!