Officials and teachers in the Cape Henlopen School District are touting changes underway in some of the district’s math classrooms.
At a meeting last week, Jill Wittman, a math specialist with the district, told the Board of Education that some teachers had begun instituting a new model, one that upends the traditional space and workflow of math classrooms.
The “Thinking Classrooms” model is based on research by Peter Liljedahl, a researcher at Simon Fraser University. Wittman explained that his findings indicate that the usual way math classrooms work isn’t working for students. While not all classrooms are using this new method, it is spreading through the district’s schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
“Students sat, teachers talked, and we wondered why so many students decided early that math was not for them,” she said. “We started asking - what would it take to get every student thinking in every math class every day?”
The changes that some math teachers made are showing results, she added.
“A student who once sat quietly at a desk was standing at a whiteboard marker in hand, working through a problem with classmates, not waiting to be called on, not copying from the board, thinking out loud together and with confidence,” Wittman said.
That sentiment was echoed by Bridgette Perrotta, a math teacher at Love Creek Elementary, who adopted the new system this year.
“I am here to tell you that it works,” Perrotta told board members.
One thing the new model changes is how students interact. Each day, they are divided into random groups to work together on math problems that emphasize reasoning and are designed to accommodate more than one approach to a solution.
“Students know the groupings are fair, they work with someone new, they cannot hide, and they learn that every person in the room is a resource,” Wittman said. “This one practice changes the social fabric of a math class.”
Students also spend more time on their feet, working at vertical surfaces like whiteboards and chart paper, she adds.
“The research is clear, standing makes students start faster, talk more, and erase more willingly,” she explained. “Mistakes are not permanent, risk becomes possible.”
And, even the classroom space itself is redesigned, she noted.
“There is no front, there is no back row; every surface is a thinking space,” Wittman said. “Students move, gather, and disperse. The physical environment sends a message: everyone belongs here and everyone is expected to think.”
So far, Wittman said, teachers are seeing big changes, not just from the classrooms but in the students as well.
“Every student working, every student is talking about mathematics,” she said. “No one is waiting, no one is checked out. That is not typical and it is not accidental.”
Board members who spoke about the changes were uniformly supportive, with one praising the teachers for leading the movement to make changes.
Cape Henlopen schools led the state in math performance in grades 3-8 in a statewide report last year. Still, there is room for improvement, with only 52% of students passing state assessments in math.
