It's been a VERY long time since we blogged. My thoughts are that we got so turned around during the pandemic that it took a couple more years to feel like we are back on our feet. This feels like a good time to get re-started with blogging about our classrooms.
Speaking of our classrooms, both Randy and I have really gotten excited about Peter Liljedahl's (@pgliljedal) book Building Thinking Classrooms and most of our blogging will be about our experiences creating and growing our own Thinking Classrooms.
Randy is still doing academic intervention for grades 3-6 at Greenwich Elementary School in Greenwich, NY. In addition to this, he is co-teaching mathematics in a 4th grade classroom, where he and his partner teacher are beginning their second year with a thinking classroom.
I am still teaching high school mathematics at Saratoga Springs HS in Saratoga Springs NY. This coming year I will be teaching AP Calculus BC and Algebra 1. It is in my Algebra 1 classes that I am planning to implement the first two (two-and-a-half?) toolkits of a thinking classroom.
We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend workshops this past May in Connecticut with Peter Liljedahl as the facilitator. The workshop I attended was focused on how to close tasks, which I found extremely helpful as I was getting better at giving tasks (especially thin-sliced tasks) but did not feel comfortable with this next step. Randy (and his co-teacher) attended the workshop about assessment, and they found it very helpful.
At the end of June/beginning of July, we traveled to Phoenix, Arizona to attend the 2nd Annual Building Thinking Classrooms Conference. This was AMAZING for us! We were able to speak with others who are just as excited as we are about this framework and got so many ideas that we are eager to put into action in our respective classrooms.
This upcoming year, in our BTC journey, Randy will be focusing on assessment and how to assess within the BTC framework and compare/contrast it to the more traditional forms of assessment and grading. He is using the grading rubric provided by Tim Brzezinski (@TimBrzezinski) and Melisa McCain (@mccainm). I am going to be focusing on tasks (creating/finding, launching, closing) and note-making.
So, this is what the 2024-2025 school year will look like in the Swift household.
