Plenum 3

Building Thinking Classrooms: Closing the Lesson

Building Thinking Classroom is a practice most well know for having students working on thinking tasks, in random groups, and at vertical whiteboards - all of which take place during the body of the lesson. In this session, I will discuss why these practices are important as well as why it is important to think beyond the body of the lesson to the closing of the lesson. In particular, I will look at the new research on the three practices that close a thinking classroom lesson - consolidation, meaningful notes, and check-your-understanding questions. These three practices are instrumental in helping students turn the unorganized, unstructured, and informal conception they gained from their group work into organized, structured, and formalized learning for themselves. The practices discussed will intertwine with, and make extensive references to Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classrooms (K-12).