Learning is Thinking
“READING IS THINKING” a sign in a fourth grade classroom proclaims. As I walk around Hardy and visit classes in session, I can almost hear the thinking that is happening inside the minds of our students…and not just in reading.
There are so many moments of thoughtful learning that happen in the course of each day! The written work you see in backpacks – completed and corrected – represents thinking that may be more complex than the paper would suggest. An example could be seen in a second grade math lesson last week where several children were busily completing a math sheet about the value of coins. The page pictured several piggy banks with various money values written on the side of each: 35 cents, 45 cents, 20 cents, 10 cents, and so on. As I watched, one student sat back in her chair as she thought about a particularly challenging question: “Which three piggy banks would total exactly 70 cents?” She had circled two banks already, 20 cents and 35 cents. She needed the third. I watched as she looked at her sheet, gazed into the near distance, and furrowed her brow.
While she thought, I thought as well: What kind of thinking skills and strategies would she need to call upon in order to find the correct answer? I could think of many!
- The term “exactly” was important. The amount could not go over 70 cents.
- The running total of 20 + 35 had to stay constant as she mentally tested other amounts.
- The rejected piggy banks with amounts that did not work had to stay rejected to make her work most efficient
- Her ability to skip count by 5’s would be important to her speed and accuracy
- Her estimation skills would allow her to quickly dismiss piggy banks with amounts that were obviously too large or too small
- Her ability to revise her original thinking – to perhaps reject either the 20 or the 35 – if she could not find the third amount
- Her ability to persevere
After several moments, her furrowed brow relaxed and she confidently circled “15 cents”.
Often the thinking is evident only in the moment, by teacher and student, with no document that you can see. Such a moment happened in a recent first grade reading lesson. A group of four children used individual white boards to spell short vowel words their teacher dictated. When the teacher said, “get”, a boy wrote “git” on his white board. He looked at what he’d written and frowned. I could almost hear his thinking: “Wait a minute! That looks funny.” Almost instantly, his eraser wiped out the “i” and he wrote “e”, correctly spelling “get”. His teacher noticed and asked him how he knew to correct it. The boy proudly answered, “I thought of ‘Ed’ (referring to a phonics lesson) and I thought, ‘e, Ed, /e/’ and I knew it should be ‘e’”
When thinking is shared among classmates, everyone’s learning improves. A fourth grade math lesson found pairs of children on the carpet working to compute how many quarters they would need to stack up to reach the ceiling. The ceiling, they figured, was about 8 feet high. Two boys stacked plastic quarters. After several moments, they measured their stack. 41 quarters was 8 ½ inches tall. As one of the boys recorded this on his paper, the other boy sat back and thought for a moment. “It would be better to measure 9 inches,” he said. “Then it would be easier to add up how many 9’s there are in 8 feet.” This made immediate sense to his partner, and the stacking resumed. A moment – just a moment – but evidence of thoughtful work.
“LEARNING IS THINKING!” As educators, we are fascinated by how children think. We know that the work our students produce is evidence of thinking – valuable evidence even if the resulting answer is incorrect. “I am very curious about how your mind got this answer. Can you tell me? What did you think as you worked on this?” When I hear this kind of talk in a classroom I know the important work of learning is happening, for both student and teacher.
Deborah D’Amico