Building on their seminal work, Routines for Reasoning, Grace and Amy have demystified the process for teaching mathematical reasoning. Teaching for Thinking concretely unravels how a teacher can systemically give all students the opportunity to discover and make sense of mathematical structures, quantities, and relationships. Three critical instructional shifts and five essential teaching strategies are carefully integrated into clear implementable routines and then thoughtfully deconstructed.
This incredibly accessible text is a must read for classroom teachers and for systems leaders committed to transforming access to mathematical reasoning.
- Ellen Barger, Assistant Superintendent, Curriculum & Instruction, Santa Barbara County Education Office
A long overdue theme for mathematics learning and teaching is engagement and equity. To realize true mathematical understanding, all students must construct meaning for themselves. The challenge for teachers is not to do the reasoning for students, but rather for them to facilitate students’ reasoning for themselves. For teachers, this is far easier said than done. Grace and Amy newest book, builds on the original book, Routines for Reasoning, to introduce daily mathematical routines to foster student-center classrooms that generate discourse and reasoning, and promote regular engagement in the Common Core Standards of Mathematical Practice. Grace and Amy’s newest book, Teaching for Thinking: Fostering Mathematical Teaching Practices Through Reasoning Routines shares additional routines that promote strategies and techniques that foster student’s mathematical reasoning. These two books are necessary reads for all mathematics teachers!!
- David Foster, Founder, Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative
In their book Routines for Reasoning, Kelemanik, Lucenta, and Jansen provided teachers with practical strategies for implementing the standards for mathematical practice. Teachers all over the country have embraced these routines and are making a difference for student achievement in mathematics. In their new book Teaching for Thinking, Kelemanik and Lucenta build on their previous work. This book encourages teachers to specifically tend to student thinking. They believe this can be done by having the teacher move out of the way and allow students to share their thinking with each other. Kelemanik and Lucenta share two new routines with readers that give teachers additional tools to support student success in the mathematics classroom. Kelemanik and Lucenta generously share strategies for teachers to develop their own routines. This book is for teachers, and anyone who supports them, to help them transform mathematics classrooms into spaces where students can thrive.
- Kyndall Brown, Executive Director, California Mathematics Project
Teaching thinking is the most important thing schools can do right now – not what to think or even how to think but to think before declaring what is right or wrong, true or false. In this book, Kelemanik and Lucenta what thinking can look like in math classrooms, how it can be taught and how it can be learned. They make explicit how students can interact with one another as they actively learn to think. They detail the importance of the teacher actions that make that interaction productive. And they clearly explain the importance of routines for building thinking as a habit for all students.
Since thinking in collaboration with peers is not something most people experience regularly in or out of schools, we need to engage in the kind of explicit habit-building that Kelemanik and Lucenta feature to make it part of our everyday actions. In Teaching for Thinking, the authors are more articulate and precise about the relationship between routines and learning new habits. Building on their earlier book, Routines for Reasoning, they offer a window into the design process, empowering teachers to create their own instructional routines.
There are many ways in which this book is perfect for use in teacher study groups, but it also contains the resources individual teachers can use to improve their own practice, building on routines to learn from students and to revise the ways in which they regularly interact in the classroom. The use of student work and examples of classroom dialogue in the text supports connections between the ideas in the book and how they play out in classrooms. Continuously emphasizing the ways in which teaching can be structured to get students talking and working together, Kelemanik and Lucenta demonstrate how teachers can learn by watching and listening to what students do. They recognize that habits take time to build and that time needs to be devoted to students developing their thoughts and taking account of the thoughts of others.
- Magdalene Lampert, Professor, University of Michigan, School of Education
