As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
#LearningInTheLoo: #ThinkingClassroom Part 4 (h/t @aledaklassen)
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Category Archives: Pedagogical Practice
#LearningInTheLoo: #ThinkingClassroom Part 3
My learning in the loo has been more of a monthly endeavour than weekly this year. Oof.
As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
#LearningInTheLoo: Cycles 1 & 2 of Implementing a #ThinkingClassroom
In the first two and a half months of school I’ve only managed to get out 2 editions of Learning in the Loo (the hope is weekly, but you know how it is!). I’ve been sharing (with her permission) Aleda Klassen‘s amazing sketchnotes of the various cycles of implementation of Peter Liljedahl’s Thinking Classroom framework. Here are the 2 I’ve posted so far this year:
As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
#LearningInTheLoo: the Question Matrix
In the AQ I’m taking right now, our instructor asked us to complete a question matrix for one of our posts. I originally learned about the question matrix from a previous AQ and then used it with my BTT1O (Introduction to Information and Communication Technology in Business) class. The question matrix is a great way to encourage folks to think beyond the obvious and quick questions when engaging in the inquiry process. In BTT1O I had students pick a topic for a research project and then their first task was to complete a question matrix to come up with as many possible research questions on their topic as they could. If I were redoing that activity, I would probably introduce a question matrix earlier in the course (on a different topic) that we would complete collaboratively as a group before expecting each student to complete one on their own.
Inspired by a colleague who sometimes leaves written notes on the Learning in the Loo posters in a certain bathroom stall, I actually invited staff to do so on this week’s poster. Our school is starting to focus on Culturally Responsive & Relevant Pedagogy in our staff meetings lately, so I invited staff to bring a pen with them & fill in some of the boxes with questions they have about CRRP. Is that going too far; asking folks to bring their pen to the loo & collaborate? I guess we’ll see if they take up the task!
As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
🚽 #LearningInTheLoo: QSSSA – A Structured Conversation Technique
In one of our #BFC530 Breakfast Chats on Twitter in September Dr. Carol Salva shared the below tweet about the QSSSA (Question, Stem, Signal, Share, Assess) strategy. I hadn’t heard of it before but it seemed like a really great bite-sized strategy that I could share as a Learning in the Loo poster.
I found a great blog article by Valentina Gonzalez (and her awesome sketchnote – we all know how partial I am to a sketchnote) on this strategy. I reached out to see if she would allow me to turn the blog post into a poster and she graciously said yes.
So here it is going up in every staff bathroom in my school as we speak:
Have you used this strategy before? How will you incorporate it into your classroom moving forward?
As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
#ThinkingClassroom Question Prompts Graphic
In August Kristen Huang mentioned on Twitter that it would be useful to have a phone-friendly graphic of the 10 Things to Say in Response to a Proximity or Stop-Thinking Question from Peter Liljedahl‘s Building Thinking Classrooms book.
I thought that sounded like a cool idea. So this week I got busy in Google Drawings and created a graphic that could be saved as a lock-screen image to a cell phone. Might be handy as teachers are circulating to various groups at the boards to remind themselves of ways they can answer these question types with a question in return.
You can download the original graphic here.
Also, did you know that Peter has published a follow-up supplementary book?
Modifying Your Thinking Classroom for Different Settings; A Supplement to Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics
Have you read it yet?
Are there other lock-screen graphics that would be useful? Let me know in the comments below.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
🚽 #LearningInTheLoo: Getting to Know you Questions
Last week someone on Twitter was asking around for a list of “getting to know you” questions and my blog post on the topic was shared in response. It occured to me that it would make a good learning in the loo poster as I’ve noticed how quiet classes are this year w/ the cohorting resulting in smaller class sizes each day and the fact that students have to sit far apart (social distancing). A daily getting to know you question breaks the ice and gets everyone talking, sharing and learning about their classmates. I’m the first one to say I hate icebreaker activities, but this routine done at the start of every class is something I love. In small classes like we currently have I tend to do this as a full class activity where each of shares our answer out loud to the whole class. When I have bigger classes, this is done in small, visibly random, groups of 3.
As always, all my past editions (including this one) of Learning in the Loo can be found here.
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
#ThinkingClassroom Book Club – #MTBoS #MathChat
With everyone receiving their copies of the Thinking Classroom book over the last few weeks I thought it was a good time to launch a book club on Twitter so folks can think about what we’re reading & share our thoughts and questions with each other.
So every Monday at 8:00pm EST all are welcome to join us at the hashtag #ThinkingClassroom on Twitter. Each week we’ll discuss one of the chapters from the book following this schedule:
| Date | Chapter | Topic |
| Nov 9 | fwd + intro + 1 | Types of Tasks |
| Nov 16 | 2 | Visibly Random Groups |
| Nov 23 | 3 | Vertical Nonpermanent Surfaces |
| Nov 30 | 4 | Defronting the Room |
| Dec 7 | 5 | Answering Student Questions |
| Dec 14 | 6 | Task Delivery |
| Jan 4 | 7 | Homework –> Practice |
| Jan 11 | 8 | Student Autonomy |
| Jan 18 | 9 | Flow |
| Jan 25 | 10 | Consolidation |
| Feb 1 | 11 | Student Notes |
| Feb 8 | 12 | What we Evaluate |
| Feb 15 | 13 | Formative Assessment |
| Feb 22 | 14 | Grading |
| Mar 1 | 15 | The Toolkits |
I post, from my personal Twitter profile, a new question every 10 or so minutes. We use the Q# / A# format. Remember to include #ThinkingClassroom somewhere in your tweet so others will find it in the chat! And then at 9pm EST, for those that want to stick around, we’ll work on a task together via Google Meet & a Jamboard.
This week was the first meet up for the first chapter & I couldn’t believe how many folks came out to participate! Must have been in the hundreds – it sure felt like it. My notifications were blowing up & I could hardly keep up with it all. It was amazing. The author of the book, Peter Liljedahl, participated this week too which was awesome of course. So great to see so many educators take an hour out of their packed evening to chat about this book & the classroom practices it outlines:
Then at 9pm I invited everyone that wanted to stick around to a Google Meet where we use breakout rooms and a Jamboard to randomly make groups & let people solve a task together. I chose the Four 4s task: Make the numbers from 1 to 30 using four 4’s and any operations. We had about 15 people divided up into 4 groups. You can check out their work on our Jamboard here if you’re interested.
I can’t wait for this coming Monday to see everyone back for chapter 2! Will we see you there?
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
New Book Out: Building Thinking Classrooms
In the spring I posted on my blog that I was working on illustrating a book coming out this year. And this week I got to hold a copy of the book in my hands and celebrate with the author and many Math friends with a virtual book launch!
If you’re reading my blog then I likely don’t need to convince you of how amazing the Thinking Classroom framework is. In short, it was an overnight game changer for my classroom. It got my applied level learners solving problems, collaborating with their peers, talking about Math, succeeding in the course & even enjoying Math a little it more!
The book looks great in addition to being chockablock full of amazing teaching tips based on careful research. The team at Corwin did an amazing job with this book. I am so thankful to Peter Liljedahl, the author, for including me in this project with him!
If you wish to purchase a copy of the book you can do so from Corwin’s website here.
The author, Peter Liljedahl, announced at the book launch a new website dedicated to all things Thinking Classroom!
https://buildingthinkingclassrooms.com
It includes his first blog post titled Thinking Tasks for Online Teaching.
Last but not least, I’m hoping to get an online book club going shortly so we can all read & discuss the book together on Twitter. If this is something you’d be interested to participate in, please fill out this form to get notified of the details.
Let me know what you think of the book in the comments below!
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
New Book Coming: Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics
A while back I was approached by Corwin Press about the opportunity to illustrate a book being written by Peter Liljedahl about the Thinking Classroom framework. Who, me?
I am far from being an artist or illustrator. But years ago I created a sketchnote about the elements of the Thinking Classroom that seemed popular on Twitter as more of us learned about this teaching framework. Shortly thereafter I updated it to include the most recent elements of the framework Peter was sharing. I think based on these sketchnotes Peter may have given my name to Corwin as a possible illustrator. But I was VERY reluctant to say yes to illustrating the book. What do I know about illustrating? I sketchnote to share what I’m learning about. My sketchnotes are often text heavy and the illustrations I do make are full of rudimentary stick figures. I mentioned the opportunity to a colleague, explaining how reluctant I was to take it on as I did not have confidence I could produce something good, and she really pushed me to do it even if it was outside my comfort zone.
So I said yes to Corwin. Full of nerves. I also told them straight up that if what I produced wasn’t up to par that they were welcome to tell me so at any time & go with someone else for the job. I stayed quiet about the whole thing as I got to work on it, not because I wasn’t excited about it, but because I really had this nagging feeling that at any moment they were likely to come back to me and say the drawings are not quite what they were hoping for & they’d have to go with a proper illustrator.
Then last month Peter tweeted this:
. . . and it was at that point that I thought, well I guess they won’t fire me now that it’s been announced I’m illustrating it!
I have since finished all the illustrations. And man do they every take longer when they need to be good! Normally I’m sketchnoting just for me. I share them online, yes, but the quality is less important as I’m making them to help myself remember & make sense of what I’m learning about and to share that with others. “Ideas, not art” as Mike Rohde says. So I was really shocked to see how long each sketch was taking when creating something that needed to be as excellent as I could possibly make it in order to do Peter’s ideas and research justice. I finished the edits they asked for this week. And just yesterday I got to see the cover for the first time! With my name on it 🙂
I’m so excited to get my hands on a copy of this book. I have learned so much reading it even after having used this framework for 6 years in my classes. There are so many subtle teacher moves and nuances that you can master to increase its effectiveness and this book covers it all! When it’s ready for orders you can be sure I’ll post the news here!
– Laura Wheeler (Teacher @ Ridgemont High School, OCDSB; Ottawa, ON)
Wheeler's thoughts on teaching 