Beyond Building Thinking Classrooms with Peter Liljedahl

From the elephant in the classroom to math in the next 10 years

 Dr. Peter Liljedahl

In an early-morning pre-calculus class in British Columbia, Canada, Dr. Peter Liljedahl was about to discover something that would transform his teaching forever.

He wrote a calculus problem on the board—a standard exponential function to differentiate—and asked his high school seniors to solve it together.

Then something interesting happened–absolutely nothing.

“It was dead air multiplied by ten,” said Liljedahl. “I wasn’t going to break, so I said I had some photocopying to do and walked out of the room.”

He returned after five minutes. Still nothing. Ten more minutes passed. Still silence. Finally, he dismissed the bewildered class.

The same problem was still on the board when the students returned two days later. Liljedahl again told them to turn and talk to each other to solve the problem. He again left the room. “I could see them from the parking lot,” he said. “Finally, after 15 minutes, someone turned and talked to their neighbor.”

The experience forced Liljedahl to confront an uncomfortable truth. “I realized I wasn’t doing them any favors,” said Liljedahl. “I hadn’t helped them to think. I was enabling them, not empowering them.”

At this moment, Liljedahl realized what I was doing wasn’t working. “Something had to change,” he said. “I needed to empower them more than I was, because all I was doing was enabling them.”

This necessary change would eventually contribute to Liljedahl’s revolutionary approach, Building Thinking Classrooms.

We recently sat down with Dr. Liljedahl and got his thoughts on how Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) in mathematics have impacted students, changed teachers, what he wants to see in mathematics education in the next 10 years, and a sneak peek into what he plans to talk about during the 2025 The National Institutes by Carnegie Learning (TNI) LONG + LIVE + MATH Power Talks.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What epiphanies emerged for you after spending lots of time observing different classrooms?

A: Kids spend a lot of time in the classroom not thinking. Because they are not thinking, they are not learning. Thinking is a necessary precursor to learning. 

Many of the classrooms I was in were largely unchanged from the post-industrial envisioning of what a classroom should be. Yes, we’ve gone from blackboards to greenboards to whiteboards to smartboards, but kids are still sitting, the teacher is still standing, the kids are still writing in their notebooks, and the teacher is still writing on the board. The goal of classrooms at the end of the first industrial revolution was to create conformity and compliance. That’s what they do well, and not a lot of things have changed in the past 170 years. 

Q: Maybe these institutionally normative structures are preventing thinking from happening? 

There’s an elephant in the room–and it’s the room. We haven’t changed it. We’ve thought of it as non-negotiable. And then we’ve negotiated everything else within this space. We’re bringing in technology. We’re going to change the way we get homework. We’re going to shift our assessment practice. We’re changing everything except the room. We’re not changing the environment in which we’re asking students to behave differently, so they’re going to continue to behave the same. 

Q: So what are Building Thinking Classrooms in mathematics doing?

A: They are changing not only the environment but also the lived experience of learners. This is helping shape more positive identities and, ultimately, more optimistic futures for these students.

Q: How does it shape more positive identities for students?

A: The stories that students tell themselves about who they are are hugely impactful in shaping who they will become. If they are sitting in an environment where they feel traumatized by the mathematics they are meant to be learning, the narrative they are telling themselves is, ‘I’m not good at this. This is not what I’m meant to be doing.’ 

And then comes the self-deprecating speech, ‘I’m not strong. I’m not talented. I’m not smart.’ That, coupled with the trauma they are experiencing, causes them to start to shy away from mathematics altogether. 

Q: How can the student be successful?

A: They meet someone who believes in them–their teacher. Then, they start to believe in their teacher’s belief in them–we call that trust.

That trust is established by asking the kids to do things they will be successful in, which means we have to start with activities and tasks that guarantee success. Students need successive successes to build self-confidence.

So that’s nothing surprising. But now we slide into productive struggle, the idea that we need to have kids struggle productively, which means that they have to have optimism. They have to be cognitively present. They have to make decisions. They have to be present to do the work.

So the biggest misunderstanding about productive struggle is that all we have to do is challenge students and they’re going to struggle productively. But if we start to think about productive struggle as a state, not a trait, we start to realize that we have to make sure that we can create the environment that’s going to trigger the state of productive struggle.

Q: What mindshifts do teachers need to implement Building Thinking Classrooms effectively?

A: First, we have to start seeing our students as capable, as able to figure things out before we tell them how to do it. That’s a big shift. The minute we tell them how to do it, we’ve just taken whatever the activity was and turned it into a mimicking task. We have to preserve the thinking nature of the task by not giving it away. 

Second, we need to recognize that anything we say to students before they’ve had a chance to think is going to be abstract to them, and it’s going to be hard for them to make sense of. But anything we say to them after they’ve had an opportunity to think makes more sense to them. We have to get them to think first, and then we can add rigor, formulation, and structure afterward. This is opposite to the way we were taught to teach, which was putting the rigor and structure up front and having the kids reproduce it.

Q: What do you want to see in mathematics in 10 years?

A: I think we need to shift to a responsibility framework rather than an accountability framework. Teachers can use their professional judgement to decide what is best for them and their students.

Every teacher should have the right to choose the best pedagogy for them, provided they are empowered to do so, given permission to do so, and given the resources to do so.

Finally, I’d like to see a shift toward process over product. We need to find ways to assess and value the student behavior in the classroom, instead of just the remnants they leave on a piece of paper at the end of the unit and hand it in to us. We need to make that shift so we can start to really value the things that we know are actually going to allow a student to be successful going forward. 

Q: Can you give us a peek at what you’ll be talking about at The National Institutes LONG + LIVE + MATH events?

A: I’ll be talking about formative assessment, which is almost always positioned as information that the teacher needs to know to decide what to do moving forward–information that informs the teacher. But what if we start to think about the information that informs the learner? Can that enable us to provide the kind of feedback that students actually need to navigate their own learning? What will we see when students have the same knowledge as we do?

Can’t wait to find out? Register for The National Institutes by Carnegie Learning LONG + LIVE + MATH events now to hear more from Dr. Peter Liljedahl. Until then, check out his video sneak peek below!