Teaching our children to think and
reason mathematically is a challenge, not because students can’t learn
to think mathematically, but because we must change our own often
deeply-rooted teaching habits. This is where instructional routines come
in. Their predictable design and repeatable nature support both
teachers and students to develop new habits.
In Teaching for Thinking, Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta pick up where their first book, Routines for Reasoning,
left off. They draw on their years of experience in the classroom and
as instructional coaches to examine how educators can make use of
routines to make three fundamental shifts in teaching practice:
- Focus on thinking: Shift attention away from students’ answers and toward their thinking and reasoning
- Step out of the middle: Shift the balance from teacher-student interactions toward student-student interactions
- Support productive struggle: Help students do the hard thinking work that leads to real learning
With three complete new routines, support for designing your own
routine, and ideas for using routines in your professional learning as
well as in your classroom teaching, Teaching for Thinking will
help you build new teaching habits that will support all your students
to become and see themselves as capable mathematicians.
