← Work For Humans
Work For Humans
What Classrooms Reveal About Designing Better Work | Peter Liljedahl, Revisited
01:10:36
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:04]
A
I tore down the institutionally normative structures of classrooms and then built it back up, always with the research lens of if I add this to the classroom, is it going to increase thinking? Is it going to get more students thinking? Is it going to get them thinking for longer? We're going to examine everything from how furniture is placed to how we answer questions to how we ask questions, and nothing got to come back into that structure unless it could show that it increased thinking. And not only that it increased thinking, that it increased thinking more than anything else that we tried.
- [00:42]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This episode with Dr. Peter Lillydal changed how I think about the design of work. It taught me just how many assumptions we need to challenge on the way to creating great work design and how big a difference we can make when we do. It all started when, as a PhD student in education, Peter came across a disturbing most students in most classrooms were not thinking. Peter set out to fix that. He cataloged every classroom norm and how each promoted or inhibited thought. He then spent decades experimenting and redesigning classrooms from their most fundamental assumptions on up. Today, Peter has transformed classrooms across the globe. There are rock stars in math education, and Peter is definitely one of them. So of course I wanted to talk to him about what those of us thinking about the redesign of work can learn from his approach. Peter is an author, researcher, and professor of faculty education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has authored 38 journal articles, over 50 conference papers, and 12 books, including Building Thinking Classrooms. In this episode, Peter and I talk about redesigning the classroom and how it can be applied to work, transforming traditional norms to achieve better results, and the importance of collaboration in learning and in working. We also discussed the best ways to evaluate employee performance, what creates those aha moments, the structure of a good task, and many other topics. All right, if you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next one. And now my conversation with Dr. Peter Liljedal. Peter Liljedal, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:47]
A
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
- [02:51]
B
So what we do on this show is we talk about the design of the experience of work. That's most of what we talk about. And my favorite shows are ones where I can reach beyond the edge of the traditional practitioners of work design or HR or any of the other pieces, and bring in somebody who's a world's leading expert in something that I believe is so closely or Even distantly adjacent, that we can learn a completely different perspective on the problem space. And so you are one of the world's leading designers of the classroom experience for students, and in particular, math students. And you have built up a practice which is about the thinking classroom. And you worked with a number of middle school teachers and looked at their practice and how students were engaging with that. And what did you find?
- [03:46]
A
So, first of all, I'm a former classroom teacher and I was missing the classroom. So I found ways to finagle my way back into classrooms. And I was spending time in these rooms as a fly on the wall, trying to understand the student's lived experience. I say from behind the facade, what a teacher sees in a classroom is very much determined by what the student is willing to let you see. And I wanted to see behind this facade. And it's really hard to do if you are the classroom teacher, because this facade is projected at the teacher. So I have to be a second body in the room to be able to see behind this, this curtain, so to speak. What I saw was, by and large, that students were not thinking, at least not in ways that we know they need to be thinking in order to be learning and to be becoming better at mathematics. And yeah, it was a deeper dive into that revealed that 80% of students were doing virtually no thinking whatsoever, and 20% were, but then again, only for 20% of the time.
- [04:53]
B
In your writing, you use the term studenting. What is studenting?
- [04:58]
A
So studenting is actually a term coined by an American researcher named Pfunstermacher. He coined it as a analog to teaching. Right. So teachers do a lot of things that fall outside of the act of trying to produce learning. Right. They're taking attendance, they're collecting consent forms, they're meeting with colleagues in the staff room, they're interfacing with parents. Teaching is the larger description of what teachers do. So he wanted an analog to this, and he came up with the term studenting as the all encompassing thing that students do, some of which is learning. Now, when he first started this, it was more of an optimistic use of the term that students are studying, students are collaborating, these sorts of things. But over time, he started to get a more jaded view, and he started to realize that by and large, what students are doing is sort of gaming the system, groveling for marks, finding ways to sort of go unnoticed. So I adopted this term as studenting is what students do in a learning situation, some of which is learning. And when I dug into this idea of, okay, if students are not thinking, what is it that they're actually doing? Studenting seemed like an appropriate term to use to describe the myriad of things that I saw students do. Right. So some students are slacking. They're just off task, visibly off task. Some students are stalling. So stalling is things they're doing to avoid the work, but they're hiding behind a facade of legitimate on task, off task behavior. So, like getting a drink of water, going to the bathroom, sharpening their pencil, looking for something in their backpack, going to their locker. These are all off task behaviors, but they're legitimate off task behaviors, unlike the slacking, which could just be looking at a cell phone. And some of them were mimicking. I'll get to that in a minute. But some of them were faking, pretending to work, going through the motions, but not actually doing anything. The vast majority were mimicking, which you would think is more synonymous with learning than not. But when you dive into the motivations of what it is that students are doing when they're mimicking, their motive is not necessarily learning. Their motive is production. It's just to produce for you the things that you've asked for. So it's a way of sort of checking boxes, let's say jumping through hoops to satisfy your needs for production, productive behavior, and compliance. And then they're doing those things.
- [07:43]
B
And so mimicking is an important one to point out because mimicking is. I'm writing the math on the page, I'm following the road instructions that you gave me to get to the answer that you're going to tell me is right and that I can show you is right. But I'm not thinking about the math. Right. It's more of a rote reproduction.
- [08:05]
A
Yeah, rote reproduction is a really good term for it. Right. I think we all remember those moments in school ourselves where it was a lot of fake it till you make it.
- [08:21]
B
On work for humans. We've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull so you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11fold.com. Well, I mean, I, to be honest, I, I think I thought that's what school was for, is I Need to learn these rote. And I was terrible at it. I didn't need a cell phone. A bird out the window was enough for me. Any shiny object I remember, I remember very specifically. And I'll tell you where we're going to tie this in because it's interesting. There's studenting, which has this performative aspect to it. Some percentage of it is performative. And it reminds me very much of the term kayfabe which comes from big time wrestling, which is we're going to pretend to be in a fight here, we're going to pretend to be wrestling. But there's studenting, I suspect at work there's probably workering and there's probably managering and there's probably in schools there's something which would be called teachering, which is that there are ways that teachers are supposed to look and feel that they're supposed to look that are somewhat performative. I didn't make this term up teachering. It was Johnny Wilson at the University of California, Santa Cruz and one of his colleagues. But this idea that everybody feels that they need to play a role. Managers get into this situation all the time, which is that my team expects me to behave a certain way in regards to them and it's tempting to perform that way. So it's an interesting way of looking at a lot of social situations.
- [10:28]
A
Yeah, I think any social situations where roles are assigned or negotiated and there is that performative expectation. One of the things we found in our research was that there are really only two roles in the classroom. And that is the role of the student and the role of the teacher in that sort of normative classroom, right. Where students sit and get and sit and do and the teacher is the keeper of knowledge. There are two roles, the teacher and the student. And this comes from a theory called role theory. And what's interesting is every once in a while the students get out of role, right? They get out of their out of position. So they're off task, they're doing something they're not supposed to be doing. They're looking at their cell phone. So they're being non compliant. One of the things we noticed was every time a teacher is about to catch them doing that or catches them doing that, the first thing the students did was ask a question. Now I don't think this is conscious, but the first thing they did of the teacher was ask a question. So the teacher's like, what are you doing there? And the students are like, oh, I have a question on this task here. Are we Supposed to find like one answer or all the answer. And the teacher would answer that and then everything would be right in the world. And I saw this a number of times and it was like, what is the quickest way to get back into position? You do the most studently thing you possibly can is you ask a question. So it's this sort of when you're out of position, you do something to get yourself back into position quickly and you do the most managerly or workerly or whatever it is that is to get back into that role.
- [12:09]
B
Yeah. Yale political scientist James Scott wrote a book, he studied peasants. And one of the books he wrote was called Weapons of the Weak. And the weapons of the week include foot dragging, feign compliance and sabotage, and a number of other things that are not revolution. You know, the history, what he pointed out was the history of political science was you study the revolutions. But he said most resistance is not revolution. Most resistance is these much more quiet weapons of the weak.
- [12:45]
A
So, you know, like social media has been consumed by these weapons of the weak, the malicious compliance, the weaponized incompetence. These ways that people are choosing are enacting their agency. This is actually something that we found in classrooms all the time. Teachers ask when you start to give students more agency, aren't they going to abuse that privilege? And my answer to that is they always have agency. Students have had agency their whole lives. How they comply is how they exercise their agency. So studenting that we just talked about, those studenting behaviors are all with the exception of slacking or all compliance based behaviors, but they're exercising their agency in how they choose to comply and meet the expectations of the teacher.
- [13:39]
B
Very interesting. I want to talk about a thinking classroom. What is is a thinking classroom? And then we'll go back and we'll look at some of the norms underlying non thinking classrooms.
- [13:52]
A
At its core, a thinking classroom is a reaction to this reality. We just talked about, about this studenting reality, the way students slack, stall, fake, mimic and how these are non learning, non thinking behaviors. Building a thinking classrooms is about how do we react to that. And the way I reacted to it in my research was I tore down the institutionally normative structures of classrooms and then built it back up, always with the research lens of if I add this to the classroom, is it going to increase thinking? Is it going to get more students thinking? Is it going to get them thinking for longer? And there was really the only non negotiables I worked with was we're still inside the four walls of the classroom. And we still work on the same bell schedule, but other than that, we're going to examine everything from how furniture is placed to how we answer questions to how we ask questions to how we form groups, to where students work to what kinds of tasks we use. We're going to examine everything, the kinds of autonomy we want students to develop, how we manage engagement through hints and extensions, how we close a lesson, how we open a lesson. We examined every part of this, and nothing got to come back into that structure, into that classroom, unless it could show that it increased thinking. And not only that, it increased thinking, that it increased thinking more than anything else that we tried. So in a normative classroom, students sit in a thinking classroom, students stand in a normative classroom. The teacher either picks the groups or they pick their own groups. In a thinking classroom, groups are randomized. In a normative classroom, they work on paper. In a thinking classroom, they work on a whiteboard, a vertical whiteboard. In a thinking classroom, the lesson, the part where the teacher gives more information, happens at the end of the lesson, more so than at the beginning, which is a sort of upside down of what a normative classroom is. And these are, in a way, they're contrary by design. Because the first thing I would do when I was examining a new variable like where should students work? Was I would look at, how's it going right now? Right now they're sitting and working in their notebook. How's that going? Let's examine that. Right now the teacher's forming the groups. How's that going? Right now we're assigning homework and grading homework. Well, how's that working? I would look at that sort of status quo of the normative classrooms, and I would interrogate that through the lens of thinking. So this is, I think, one of the things that would transfer into any realm, which is we have to stop asking if what we're doing is good, and we have to start asking what it's good for. Because when we just ask if it's good, we're not bringing any sort of evaluative measure to that. And unless we're consistent in what it's good for, we're not really going to construct anything that is systematically good at something. So I kept asking the question, is, is this good for thinking? Is this good for thinking? Is this good for thinking? So when I look at homework, is this good for thinking? When I look at the way students write notes, is this good for thinking? And by asking that question over and over and over again, it revealed that most of what we do in classrooms is highly ineffective for thinking, and it wasn't designed for thinking. Classrooms were designed for conformity and compliance. So then when we take these things out and build it back up, always with that question in mind, is this good for thinking? What reveals itself to be true is that we need to do things different. And that's what the research showed. We need to have students standing, working on vertical whiteboards, and random groups of three. By the way, one marker per group is an incredibly productive space for getting students to think. We have to stop asking the question, is something good? And start asking the question, what is it good for? Because when we ask the question, is it good? The answer could be yes in every circumstance. But we haven't really brought an evaluative measure to it. We haven't brought some standard to it. What I was asking was, is it good for thinking? When I sign homework and then I'm graded, is that good for thinking? If I have the student sit and just copy what I'm writing on the board in their notebook, is that good for thinking? And the answer to both of these turned out to be no. So now we got to do it differently. We got to find a different way to do homework. We got to find a different way to do notes in such a way that it is good for thinking. Now, thinking was a thing I chose to pursue, and that needed those answers. We needed to start looking at the classroom through that question, is this good for thinking? Can I get more students thinking? Can I get them thinking for longer?
- [18:49]
B
There's a couple of different points in there. First of all, one of the experiments you did, which I admired, was you just said, how's furniture working? Let's get rid of all of it. So students came into class one day, and there wasn't a stick of furniture in the room. How'd that work? And so you were doubting every fundamental assumption, and you were starting from scratch at every point you know, of the process.
- [19:13]
A
Yeah. And in fact, I used what I call the contrarian approach, which is when something reveals itself to be really ineffective, do we really want to save any part of it, or can we just throw it all out? Or should we just throw it all out? Furniture was. Case in point. I wasn't really sure what the role of furniture was. And we were trying a lot of different things. At the beginning, we were being really adventurous. So, yeah, a group of eight teachers, we took out all the furniture. Kids came in the next day, no furniture. It turns out it increased student thinking. And that was sort Of a surprise. It was almost like a lark that we tried it on, but it increased student thinking. It took me over two years to understand why. And the answer to that comes from something called systems theory, which is out of the 1970s. But systems theory is this understanding that almost all social situations can be described as a system. It's a collection of agents and forces. So in a classroom, you got the teacher, and then you got all the students. Those are the agents. And then there's forces between all of them. The teachers exerting forces on the students, the students are exerting forces on the teacher. The students are exerting forces on each other. But then there's also other agents. There's the parents. They're exerting forces on the teacher and the students. Then there's the administration, then there's colleagues, Then there's the state exam or whatever. There's all these agents acting inside of this system. They're all exerting forces. And when you have a bunch of agents and a bunch of forces, eventually the system will reach a stasis point, a stable point, a point where all of these sorts of agents have sort of found their place and balanced each other out so that this system is now stable. And once stable, it is incredibly hard to change a system. One of the things we know about systems is that they defend themselves. When one of the agents tries to make change, the rest of the system defends itself because all of these forces are pulling on this. And this is a theory that's been been used to explain how a lot of systems, organizations, classrooms, government agencies, how things don't change over time. You replace an agent with another agent, it maybe restabilizes marginally different, but not significantly different. Well, if that's true, how do you change anything? Well, it turns out that the way you change a system is you overwhelm the system. You produce so much new force that the whole system has to find a new, stable point. And I think taking out the furniture did that.
- [21:52]
B
I want to call out the different norms that you examined, and then I want to talk about, for some of them, anyway, the ways in which you transformed those norms, the way you started over with those norms. So Here are the 14 what types of tasks we use. This is in a classroom. How we form collaborative groups where students work, how we arrange the furniture, how we answer questions, when, where, and how tasks are given, what homework looks like, how we foster student autonomy, how we use hints and extensions, how we consolidate a lesson, how students take notes, how we choose to Evaluate. It's going to be a big one that we're going to talk about how we use formative assessment and how we grade. So another one I know we're going to want to talk about and what you've done in each of those is you've come up with a reframe of that thing. And so I'll just give one example. Vertical non permanent surfaces. It's actually not furniture, it's where, it's where students work. Yeah. So let's just talk about that one and what difference you saw when you took people away from their desks and you put them at vertical, non permanent surfaces.
- [23:12]
A
First of all, what is a vertical, non permanent surface? So we used to just call them whiteboards because that was what we were using when we were testing. But then we discovered that teachers are incredibly. Well, we didn't discover this. We knew this. Teachers are incredibly innovative. So we see the same effect that the students are writing on a window, writing on the side of a file cabinet, writing on a vinyl picnic table cover stapled to a bulletin board, writing on a chalkboard. Kinda. It turns out it doesn't have to be a whiteboard, it just has to be vertical and erasable. So what were the big changes we saw in student behavior when we shifted from having students sitting, writing in their notebook to standing working on a vertical whiteboard? So the first thing I'll say is let's look at the status quo. How's that going, sitting and writing in a notebook? I was encountering students who spend more time sitting, writing in a Notebook in a 24 hour period of time than they spend sleeping. Now, I think the adult version of that is that there are people in this world who sit and write at work on a computer more than they spend sleeping in a 24 hour period of time. But we wanted to examine this. Is this really the best place? The notebook has sort of become this catch all. Everything we do is done in the notebook. Homework is done in the notebook, notes are done in the notebook. Brainstorming drafts are all done in the notebook. Do we really want all the collaborative behavior to be done in the notebook? So we, we started experimenting with different surfaces. What if they worked on bigger surfaces? What if they worked on digital surfaces? What if they worked on surfaces that were on the walls rather than on tables and so on. And the one that was a clear winner, like the clear winner by a long shot, was when they stood and worked at a vertical whiteboard or any sort of proxy for that.
- [25:06]
B
The thing about thinking and frankly Most knowledge work is that it's invisible. So how do you tell when it's happening?
- [25:15]
A
Interesting. So you're right. Thinking is a cognitive process, and as such, it's an invisible cognitive process. When I first started the research, it was really clunky. Really what I did was I looked at the studenting behaviors, study situations, and try to understand what the studenting behaviors were. Then I subtracted away all studenting behaviors that couldn't contain thinking. And then whatever was left, that's where the thinking was. And if I saw more of that, then we were probably doing something well. So it was sort of like that sculpting the stonework kind of thing. I'm removing everything that I don't want to find what I do want. That turned out to be incredibly clunky. Eventually in my research, I discovered that there's a really close association between thinking and engagement. That when students are thinking, they are engaged, and when students are engaged, they are thinking. And that was a lifesaver because whereas thinking is an invisible cognitive process, engagement is a visible, embodied process. It manifests in our body. It manifests in the way we gesture, the way we lean in. We can see it in our eyes. We hear it in their voice. Students can't hide. I shouldn't say just students. People can't hide their engagement from us. It manifests physically.
- [26:34]
B
I just had an experience of that, if I may. I just ran a multi day manager meeting. I just had an hour of it, but I had everybody stand up and work on these giant diagrams together. And I couldn't hear sound in the rooms because one of them was in Dublin and one of them was in London and one of them. But I could see their bodies and I could see them. They were gesturing and they were just gesturing, like softly. They were like energetically pointing with their finger and like I could see. And then somebody else would raise their hands and do something like this, which does not, by the way, show up on a podcast that I'm waving my hands. But it was super visible. I mean, there was no doubt. And I was so happy to see it because people were arguing. And that was great.
- [27:19]
A
And one of the things that I found was standing up amplified the gestures. I think standing is an easier gesture space than sitting is. It manifests itself even more. So by and large, what I looked for was engagement and used that as a proxy for thinking. Now, in the particular study of having students work on whiteboards, we looked at a whole bunch of different things as well. Time to task, time on task. How Eager were they to start. How, how much participation was there, things like that. We were looking at those sorts of variables which are easily measurable either by time or subjective measures that turned out to be incredibly stable. Three people in the room would come up with the same score on these variables. But nonetheless, what we found was that having students stand and work on vertical whiteboards was incredibly powerful for getting students engaged and getting students thinking again. Like all my research, I used a methodology I called results first. Results first was I was looking to try to find, and I think this overlaps a lot with design. I was just trying to find. I call it the rapid prototyping. I was trying to find reproducible results. Can I find something that I can do over and over and over again and get the same result? And having students stand and work on vertical whiteboards was producing the same result. Students were engaged. They would stay engaged for longer. We had more students thinking. We had them thinking for longer. Now came the job of trying to understand why that is. Okay. It turns out that there's a whole bunch of small things and one really big thing, two big things. So one of the big things is that risk turns out to be a barrier to thinking. When students feel at risk, they don't want to think. And this was something that came up in the research over and over and over again. What does a whiteboard do that big flip chart paper doesn't do? Well, what a whiteboard does is it removes the risk of starting right. There isn't that expectation. It has to be perfect. In fact, it's almost inviting imperfection. The surface itself is saying, we're expecting you to make mistakes. It removes risk. And we saw that when we compared students working on a vertical whiteboard right next to a group working on vertical flip chart paper, for example.
- [29:42]
B
Right.
- [29:42]
A
Or those giant post it notes. Five minutes into the activity, the whiteboard was covered and stuff they had started. It wasn't correct, but they had started. And they find perfection through imperfection. They get there the flip chart paper blank, because to hit the paper, it's got to be perfect. But to get to perfect, we've got to go through imperfect. And that's not a safe place to start. So we create this catch 22, which prompts what we call non start behavior. And now we get, you know, picture this in a classroom or a work setting. Now we get the stalling, the faking, all of these things that are meant to look like compliance but aren't actually productive. But why vertical? Because shouldn't we see the Same effect if the students were sitting at tables with whiteboards on them. Well, it turns out that when they were standing, the work was all oriented to everybody in the same direction. Right. Everyone was oriented to the work the same way. Whereas when they're sitting, someone's looking sideways and upside down. And that automatically creates inequitable access to the work. It also creates ownership that is skewed towards one person. And with ownership comes responsibility. With lack of ownership comes lack of responsibility. Right. When it was vertical, students were able to see everybody else's work, which created access to more ideas, which really helped them when they got stuck for a century. We viewed students productivity entirely through their own bases of resources. Like what resources do they bring to the table? And is that going to allow them to be successful? Now we create a collaborative group. Okay, well, now we've expanded the resource space, but it's still one group. But when it's a bunch of groups, so it's groups among groups and we can see each other's work, it creates that cross pollination that was really powerful. We call it knowledge mobility when it's vertical. I'm more effective as a teacher. I don't need to wait until Friday to see from that quiz on Friday to see if the students understand it. I can see right now. I can intervene now. Right. Or I can leave them alone right now. But all of these things were eclipsed by one incredible piece of data that took two years to get at. It turns out that it's not that standing is so good, it's that sitting is so bad. And I don't mean like sitting is the new smoking bad. You know that that's come up. I mean that it turns out that when students are sitting, they feel anonymous. And the further they sit from the teacher, the more anonymous they feel. And when students feel anonymous, they disengage. And that's both a conscious and a subconscious act. What standing up did was it took away their anonymity. Not in a way that they felt like they were being outed, not in that sort of way where one person gets called to the board to do something in front of the class. But we're all standing, we're all visible. No one is anonymous here. There wasn't that pull of anonymity towards disengagement. And that was a game changer.
- [32:47]
B
That's fascinating. Why only one marker?
- [32:52]
A
So, well, we tried to three markers. And this is why whiteboards are better than chalkboards, by the way, because with chalkboards, they just break the chalk and then everyone has their own. I think collaboration is good in theory, and we know collaboration is incredibly powerful. But the fact that humans are naturally collaborative, I think needs to be examined a little bit more. What one marker did I call one marker? A forcing function. So a forcing function is something that we put in place that forces a certain behavior. Like if I set the alarm clock across the room, it forces me to get out of bed, to turn it off. That's a forcing function. One marker is a forcing function. It forces collaboration. It forces students to talk to each other because there's only one person with a marker, and the marker has to move.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, I've experienced that running meetings when more than one person come up to the board and start writing simultaneously, they're not talking to each other anymore. They're not interacting anymore. They've gone into their own world. They're solving their own problems. And that's almost always when I call a timeout, because we've lost it. We've lost it. We're not a room anymore.
- [34:03]
A
And the smartest person in the room is the room. That was one of the big outcomes of our research. The smartest person in the room is the room. We need to trust the knowledge that's in the room. It's so rich.
- [34:14]
B
And how did students perceive each other differently in this collaborative setting?
- [34:22]
A
That perception, I think, is more created by the visibly random groups. So it's not just that it's a group of three, and it's not that they got to self select, and it's not that the teacher selected them. It was random, and it was frequent about once every 60 to 75 minutes. So every lesson, the students come in, they get a new random group of three, and they're working together. What that did was it created community, because within three weeks, everybody has worked with everybody else. And when community is formed, empathy is unlocked. Students have a tremendous capacity for empathy. I don't think normative classrooms bring that out in them because they don't form community in the same way. But when community is formed, empathy is unlocked, and they have tremendous care for each other. And then we see a different level of collaboration. And in fact, I'm of the opinion that collaboration doesn't actually begin until students care as much about each other's learning as they do their own. And when we see that level of collaboration, we realize that everything that came before that was just patience, tolerance, and compliance.
- [35:32]
B
What is defronting the room?
- [35:35]
A
This kind of a tees off of that question you asked earlier about what happens when we take all the furniture out the room. Clearly taking out the furniture had an impact on student thinking. But teachers don't like to work in classrooms without furniture. So furniture became this sort of non negotiable thing that had to be in the classroom. But if it's going to be in the classroom, we need to think more carefully about how we place it. Teachers tend to have them in rows or the horseshoe or pairs of rows put together so students are sitting side by side. There's a pretty finite collection of ways that teachers organize their room. And we started playing with these. And one of the things that we noticed actually in our research when we weren't paying attention to furniture placement was that some classrooms were way easier to get students to think. Because when we had this, these results, we just talked about a good task, random groups and vertical surfaces. Those were reproducible results. We had gone from 20% of students thinking for 20% of the time to 80% of students thinking for 80% of the time just with those three practices. And we would go and reproduce that result in setting after setting after setting. And in some settings, it didn't work very well. And when we paid close attention to the settings in which it didn't work, we started to notice that they had something in common. And what they had in common was that these were super organized classrooms. You know, like everything was perfectly rectilinear and there was a nice border around the bulletin board, and everything was color coded. And there was an inbox and an outbox for everything. There was just all of these structures in the room. And we had our theories why that was interfering was thinking. But we tested that by showing students photographs of different classroom configurations and asking a bunch of questions. The key question turned out to be, what do you think this teacher expects? And when we asked that question of students, when we showed pictures of classrooms that were these super, I call them Pinterest ready classrooms, they all said the same thing, this teacher expects perfection. And now we're back to this thing I said earlier, which is that risk is a barrier to thinking. And when the students are in a space where they perceive that the teacher expects perfection, they don't feel safe to think. Thinking is messy. It's full of errors and wrong turns. And if you perceive that what's expected of you is perfection, that's an unsafe space for you to strike out and be innovative and things like this. And what this also revealed was something that came up in the research often, which is that students don't listen to what we say. They listen to what we do, and I would say that that's humans in general. We don't listen to what people say. We listen to what they do. So that I was in classrooms, these uber organized classrooms, where the teacher would stand at the front and say, it's okay to make mistakes. I want you to make mistakes. And then I would interview kids, and the kids would say, it is not okay to make mistakes. Right. So what is the space telling you? And it. It raised an important question for me. Is a classroom without students still a thinking classroom? The answer to that turned out to be yes, because how the classroom is configured tells students what's expected of them. And I think anyone who's gone to any sort of a workshop or professional development meeting knows this. When you walk into that room, how the furniture is arranged in that room immediately tells you what's expected of you that day. And you start shaping your behavior. And the speaker hasn't even stepped on the stage yet. What is the room saying to the people in it? What's expected of them and what's safe to do in that space?
- [39:30]
B
There's a practice that I've started in my company, which is flipping the org chart. Org charts have a manager at the top, and then there's people below. And that whole metaphor. There is a metaphor of control above and controlled below. And so flipping the org chart puts the manager below in a support role. And metaphorically, it frames the people who would normally be at the bottom of the org chart as being at the top, like growing branches up toward the sky. It's been a really interesting experience. And part of the experience is that when you first do that as a manager, it smarts a little bit because you're like, I used to be important, and now I'm just like, what am I? Do teachers have to think of themselves differently in a thinking classroom? And what is the difference?
- [40:21]
A
Definitely, you have to think about yourself differently. You have to think of yourself as someone whose job it is to mobilize knowledge, to be in that supportive role, rather than be the one who holds the knowledge and then doles out the knowledge. You have to create the environment in which knowledge can be discovered and knowledge can be mobilized. So your role is very different. Sometimes you have to see the space with a little bit of information at the beginning, a bit of knowledge, just to prime the pump, create that directive or the direction or the goal, right? And then you work in that supportive role. And it's incredibly difficult. The hardest part about it is stopping your own habits of meddling, of interfering Letting groups just work, letting them stay in that state of struggle a little bit. We want to save, we want to ease the path, we want to do these sorts of things as classroom teachers. And we have to start to recognize that our job is different in these spaces. I think our job is harder in these spaces because we have to check so many of the things that we're used to doing, like answering questions at every turn and so on and so forth. But also because we have to plan in a more organic way. So we have to work with what the room is giving us rather than what we give the room. So we have to be more responsive, and we have to be responsive in the moment rather than plan ahead and then just push it down and will the room to be a certain way. We have to work with what the room is giving us.
- [41:58]
B
It's more like gardening or farming than building. It's a different metaphor. And I think that some people's identities must be quite threatened by that. Which is my identity is I love to walk into the classroom and be the expert and provide the knowledge, and now I have to do something that is not my value anymore, or I like to be at the front of the stage, I like to be up on stage and I like to perform. And now that's not my value anymore. My value is something subtler and harder to see, even for myself.
- [42:30]
A
I have this thing, this saying, which is being in a thinking classrooms is about how can I create learning without leaving footprints of teaching? How can I make the students so that when they walk out of the room, they're feeling like they're the ones who achieved it? And my fingerprints are all over it. They just can't see it. I created the environment, I created the focus. I created, created the impetus. And I manage things around the fringes, but I want them feeling differently about it as well. It's not just me. Now, one of the things that's interesting about this is that teaching satisfaction is way up with teachers who enact this. So it's kind of weird. I'm asking you to do something that is harder, that is more frightening, because I have less control, and yet there's more satisfaction. And I think that satisfaction comes from the fact that we get to see our students flourish. Right? Which is, I think, at the core of why we became teachers.
- [43:24]
B
And by the way, it's one of the greatest rewards for managers as well. When we interview managers about what they really love about managing it is seeing their team flourish frequently, they don't feel like they're Recognized for that flourishing by their own management, they're only recognized for something else. Which actually leads us to the question of measurement. One of the norms is how we choose to evaluate. And another norm is how we grade. How are those norms altered in a thinking versus a normative classroom?
- [43:58]
A
The first one is actually what we choose to evaluate. The research showed that we want to evaluate what we value rather than what we have to evaluate. Of course there are things we have to evaluate, but evaluation is a double edged sword. Because when we evaluate our students, they evaluate us. Because what we choose to evaluate tells them what we value. And then they focus on that. And again it comes back to students don't listen to what we say, they listen to what we do. So for example, if we really value group work, if we really value collaboration, what are we doing to show that we value that?
- [44:37]
B
That.
- [44:37]
A
Because if every time I evaluate my students, I sit them down and they do a test individually, what my actions are saying is I value individual work, individual productivity. So how can I show them through my evaluative measures that I actually value collaboration? How can I show that I value perseverance, risk taking? How can I show that I value imagination, curiosity? How can I show these things through evaluation? Because if we don't do that, the students are not going to behave the way we want, right? So it was very much a journey for me about coming to grips with that. Now that's not to say that that's all we evaluate, because we also evaluate students ability to perform on a test and so on and so forth. But if that's all we evaluate, then that's what we're saying to students that is valuable. So how can we show them that we value things like collaboration, risk taking, perseverance, inquiry, like anything that is valuable to us. So that chapter is all about how can we do this? And the way we do it is we co construct norms around what it is and then we use those norms to evaluate the students. So for example, with collaboration, what makes good collaboration, what makes bad collaboration? And the students tell us, and then we use that to create a very simple tool that we can use to evaluate them, but they can use to self evaluate as well. And in that process they start to get better at collaboration. Because collaboration is now not this mysterious thing that is ill defined. It's actually we've co constructed the definition what makes good collaboration. We're sharing the marker, we're actively listening to each other, we're actively inclusive of each other. These are things that they can actually enact When I say, be a better collaborator, what does that mean? But if I say, make sure you're sharing the marker more. Oh, I can do that. It's deconstructing these elusive ideas into actionable points that the students can actually use to self evaluate. And we do that. So they self evaluate. At the end of an activity, they say, okay, were we good at risk taking today? Let's look at the metrics. And they talk about it. But we can also do it midstream. In fact, some of the most effective teachers I've worked with will launch an activity and then 10 minutes in, the kids self evaluate because that sort of resets the normative behavior of. Or the behavior of how we're going to work in this space together. Okay. We haven't been sharing the marker. I haven't really been listening to what you're saying. So let's start doing that. Okay. Now we can move forward.
- [47:27]
B
I just want to point out how much more work looks like that than test taking work. Good work. Looks like that. Right. It looks like sharing the marker. It looks like getting the most out of everybody in the room. You know, that's what it looks like.
- [47:46]
A
Right. But how do we evaluate our employees?
- [47:50]
B
We evaluate them individually. We don't do it by team. And we tend to do it against two things. Let's look at this. One of them is against a rubric, which is your job title, which is how much are you looking like your job title? Which it's very interesting that performance reviews have the word performance in them, because now it's a question of. Of appearance. Do you look to me like your job code? And then the other way we do it is productivity. Do we think that this person is particularly productive? But no person is individually particularly productive. The truth is that it's almost always collaborative. And so who we see as being productive is not necessarily. Well, they're not doing it alone. And they may not be the largest contributor to their productivity. So both of those are not great.
- [48:42]
A
But. And I'm not saying that we should invalidate those, but I'm saying what can we add to that? What can we add to this mix that communicates to us, to the employees or the students, our values? Because our values are bigger than that.
- [48:55]
B
Yeah.
- [48:56]
A
Otherwise we wouldn't put them in teams. We'd have them working in their cubicle in their desk.
- [49:01]
B
That's right. And. Well, and let's also look at the spaces that are created, which is the spaces are very often about isolation. Some people like that and other people don't I did a study where I went around and I studied everybody's cubes and I looked at how they'd modified them to make them more acceptable to themselves. And some people had put up SOGI screens to hide themselves, and some people had torn down walls to get light. And so you could see that depending on where they were, if they were close to windows, they tore down the walls, but if they were close to a walkway, they put up the SOGI screens. And so they were adapting their own physical environment. Your original PhD work was on something I want to get to, which is Aha moments in math. And the reason I want to is that a lot of people, so I ask people what they want from work and a lot of people say that they want puzzles to solve because they love to solve puzzles. There's a lot of responses to this, but that's one of them. And the thing about puzzle solving is that it is often through an aha moment. And so I've looked at aha moments and I've looked at mathematicians talking about when the big idea came to them. I was just putting my foot onto the step of a train to get into it. Yes. And it came to me and the situation that he was in to have that insight was he was going on a vacation. I don't know what he was doing, some holiday or something.
- [50:38]
A
Yeah, he was on a tour.
- [50:40]
B
What did you find about aha moments?
- [50:43]
A
Okay, so this is interesting. So the first thing I found about aha moments is that they're mostly an affective experience, more so than a cognitive experience because I interviewed or surveyed and interviewed. So I looked at three distinct populations. I looked at pre service teachers, I looked at undergraduate students. But I also looked at research mathematicians. These were award winning research mathematicians, including fields medalists and members of prestigious organizations and so on and so forth. And I read extensively the work of Henri Poincare and Jacques Hadamard. And Henri Poincare actually pretty much defined what creativity is in, not just in mathematics, but in the field of creativity. With that story, what I found was it was much more an affective experience than a cognitive experience. Because when I took their ideas, the idea that emerged in the moment of the aha and I lined it up with all the other ideas that emerged in that process. It was not remarkable.
- [51:48]
B
You're saying something that I don't understand. An affective experiences versus a something.
- [51:52]
A
What are those experiences versus a cognitive experience?
- [51:54]
B
Yeah.
- [51:55]
A
So the cognitive phenomena is what was my idea, is that what delineates the aha experience? From the rest of it, right? So an aha experience, like we're having experiences all the time. So let's break it down to us. Person is solving a puzzle, so they sit down, it isn't the case that there's nothing happening. And then bam, there's an idea. It's oh, I have this idea, I have that idea. I'll try this idea. I have this idea, I have this idea. And then maybe there's a incubation period and I can get to that in a minute. There's this phase where nothing happens. And then all of a sudden there's a flash of insight. That's the aha. And now I verify that and I okay, there it is. There's a solution. Or maybe that was a false aha. So it's not that nothing is happening. We're having ideas all the time, except they're more pedestrian than the aha experience. The aha experience is somehow more powerful. So what makes it more powerful is it that the idea that came forward is so much better than any of the other ideas. Sometimes it is like when Einstein had that idea of imagining himself riding a beam of light. That was a tremendously powerful idea. But by and large, when I line up all the ideas that have emerged in your puzzling process. Well, I had this idea, I had that idea, then this came to me. And then I tried this, and then I tried that, and then flash, there it was. And then I tried this. It doesn't look more remarkable than the ideas around it. Right? So that's not what makes the aha distinct from the more pedestrian experiences around it. What makes it more distinct is the affect of the way it makes us feel. And the way it makes us feel is it makes it we feel immediately. This is powerful. Now what's the source of that? It could be the way it comes forward. The way it moves from the subconscious to the conscious comes with this feeling. But that feeling is real, right? We feel it in our, in our heart. We get excited and it creates a memorable experience. When we think back on the phenomena, that feeling is what we remember. So what we found, what I found in that study, in that research, was that the aha experience, what demarcates it from other experiences is that it's an affective experience and it leaves traces. It changes the way we believe, the way we think about things. It changes how we believe what we believe mathematics is. It changes our self efficacy. We start to feel more capable. It has very powerful positive feelings. Interestingly, I've been sort of Pursuing creativity for my whole career. And I just published a book chapter in a different book on group creativity. There's not a lot of work done on group creativity. And I used a framework called burstiness, which comes from organizational psychology. So burstiness is something that comes from the workforce. Burstiness is that phenomena when you're in a collaborative setting, and all of a sudden someone has an idea and they offer an idea, and then the next person sort of piles on it right away, and then there's another piling on and another piling on and another piling on, and these ideas are just flooding in and everyone's interrupting each other, and it's a highly productive state. And I think anyone who's worked in collaborative settings recognizes what I just described there is that burst happens, that burstiness. Well, this is a phenomenon that comes from organizational psychology. I first tripped into it when I was listening to a podcast by Adam Grant, who's an organizational psychologist, and he was studying the way the creative team that worked for Trevor Noah for the Daily show were collaborating. And I'm not saying that's where bursiness as a theory emerged, but he used burstiness to explain the phenomena he was seeing. And it immediately clicked with me because it so accurately describes what you see in a thinking classroom. And a thinking classroom, there is this group creativity that happens and a burst happens. And there are certain conditions that are necessary for burstiness to occur. There has to be some structure, but there has to be a lot of degrees of freedom. But there has to be some structure, because when there's too many degrees of freedom, the work diverges rather than converges. There has to be diversity in the group. Now, both of these things describe a thinking classroom. Thinking classroom. Here's the structure. You're going to work at a whiteboard, and you're going to work in random groups. There's diversity that creates diversity, because if we self select, we tend to not be as diverse in our selection criteria. There has to be psychological safety. Now, I talked about that earlier, about the fact that empathy gets unlocked when community forms. There has to be that psychological safety. You have to feel safe to offer an idea. It has to be a space where criticism is welcome. Not criticisms as an attack, but criticisms as critique of ideas. And you have to feel safe both offering and receiving criticism. And we see this in a thinking classroom, that it's not that every idea is celebrated. It's like, okay, well, hold on. No, I thought maybe that. I don't think that's going to work. So it has to have this in it. There has to be freedom to shift attention. So I mentioned earlier this idea that we can look around at other groups. There is a shift of attention. We can shift to get another idea. There has to be focus. So there has to be again, if there isn't focus, if we're just spitballing, we're going to diverge. There has to be an objective here. There has to be something we're trying to achieve that creates a focus, that creates a convergence. Now the convergence isn't this funnel, it's this meandering path that intersect but are always moving towards that focus. And there has to be opportunities for non verbal communication. And we're back to the gestures. And non verbal communication is incredibly powerful because it makes interrupting not rude. Because it's our gestures that indicate that I want to come in and so on and so forth. And all of these things are present, I think in classroom. And all of these are conditions necessary for burstiness to occur.
- [58:27]
B
That collaborative creativity and the focus that you're speaking of. One of the very first patterns in the thinking classroom is begin with a problem. The nature of the problem must a be a large source of the focus, but also has to be open ended enough that there's a lot of room in there to I think of a river with lots of deltas where they come back together again. So there's lots of room to try things out and take risk. What is the structure of a good problem?
- [59:01]
A
The structure of a good task is it has to have a low floor. Everyone should be able to access it. If the task is inaccessible to one third of our audience. And this is problematic. Right? It has to have an entry point where everyone can understand the entry point. Here's a situation, we can all enter into that. But it also has to have a high ceiling, which means that there's room inside of that task as we start playing with it, either by extension or by evolving complexity. That this task has to start to create challenge for us. We have to be challenged by it. Otherwise it's just a routine exercise. I'm just fulfilling a task. It has to have novelty because thinking is what we do when we don't know what to do. If we know what to do, then it's just routine. It's just mundane. I'm exercising that routine. And those three components were really, really important. Easy entry, evolving complexity and something that was novel to it so that we had to bring thinking to it. But that by necessity creates what we call either open ended or open middle. So open ended Means that there's a myriad of possible solutions, which I think is true when we would be trying to design something. But it also can be open middle, which means that we all have a common starting point and we're all going to end up in the same place at the end. But there's a lot of different ways to get there.
- [60:24]
B
How has it been leading a paradigm shift and what have you learned about being a paradigm shifter?
- [60:34]
A
So when I think about paradigm shifts, I think about Thomas Kuhn, right? Like, wow, that's a pretty big roll.
- [60:41]
B
Well, okay, to be fair, Thomas Kuhn would say this is not a paradigm shift. He only saw paradigm shifts in the changes of scientific theory. I just think that's too limited. But I think that if you were to ask teachers, is this a complete reframe of how they did work, they would say yes. And I'm going to call that a paradigm shift.
- [61:03]
A
Okay. In many ways, I think a lot of the things that came out as optimal in my research were things that we already knew that were happening in pockets here and there that were emerging spontaneously in individual teachers practice because they were finding them to be effective for themselves. I think what my research did was validate the reality that that is effective, but also that it collected more than just the one offs. Right. I think that math education in particular, and I know this to be true, has been smoldering for a very long time. We've known something's been wrong, we've been trying to fix it. And when I say we, I mean the entire field. We've been at this for five decades trying to solve this problem. And there's been a lot of good work that's predated me. And I think this is very similar to Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift. Right. A paradigm shift in science isn't all of a sudden one person has an idea. It's. There's a tension in the field because there's data that isn't being addressed by the current paradigm. And that tension creates unease. And then that tension builds and builds and builds and builds. And then something comes along that satisfies the data better. And then there's this holistic mass shift shift to the new paradigm. But it doesn't come without tension and deliberate work and effort preceding it. I think that's what's been happening in math education for the last 30, 40, 50 years is there's been so much good work, but it's always been swimming against the current. And the biggest thing it's been swimming against is an assumption that the institutionally normative structures of school and classrooms are non negotiable, that this is what a classroom looks like. We have to have kids sitting in desks, they have to be writing on paper, that we have to move through exercises, that I am the one who holds the knowledge I have to get. And now we've been swimming against that current, and then we've been trying to enact change inside of an environment that isn't changing. And one of the things that I've learned from students is that when they walk into an environment that looks like every other environment, they bring their studenting habits with them. And it doesn't matter if I'm trying to make that environment behave differently. Everything about that environment is telling me that I should behave a certain way. And I think what thinking classrooms did was say, what if we rethink that? What if we rethink the way that the classroom has to look and operate, and all of a sudden we have a space that is actually not just conducive to thinking and doesn't just value thinking, but actually is telling students that thinking is important in this space, that it makes the environment operate and be more accepting of this rather than trying to achieve something new while keeping everyone in the old structure. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.
- [64:11]
B
Yeah, it's very similar to what we're working on in this project, which is that everybody knows and has known for a long time that treating employees well and giving them a good experience, something that they engage with, and all these different things is good, but it cannot be enacted in the existing business model. And that the existing business model recognizes employees as inputs to production, not as whole human customers. And in companies, it's very much about how power flows, which is until you're willing to actually change the power structures, which I really think you've done in the classroom, it's about partially about defronting the room and creating autonomy in the students. That is very much an example of really changing the context.
- [65:06]
A
I think you're right. It's about decentering the power so that the knowledge can flow in directions that are different from which they flow. When the classroom is centered with power.
- [65:19]
B
There'S a question I normally ask that I usually ask at the end, we may not have time to answer it all the way, which is, what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [65:30]
A
Okay, clearly my job is not just about earning money. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing the things that I'm doing. So it's what is It I'm chasing, I think, for a very long time. So if we take my job, my job as someone who has done research on classrooms and then putting out the products of that research for a very long time, I have wanted to change the lived experiences of students in the math classroom. You know, my research, I spent 20 years doing research into affect, into how students experience mathematics and the negative effects that has on them. Their negative attitudes, their negative beliefs, their negative self confidence. And of course I like, I love math. I want students to experience math the way I love it. I want them to see themselves as mathematical. And these are lofty goals. And I think what my job does for me is, allows me to pursue that. How do I change the lived experiences for students and can I make a difference in a student's life when it comes to mathematics? Can they come out of this year enjoying mathematics, feeling themselves as mathematical and not being fearful of mathematics? So that's what it does for me, is it allows me to do that. But more than that, it also allows me to change the lived experiences of teachers in the classroom. Teachers are not paid enough to do the job solely for money. It's an incredibly hard job. It's demanding, it's getting more demanding as time goes by. They need to have job satisfaction and that satisfaction is difficult to come by when there's so many normative pressures on us to do things a certain way in ways that is not satisfying to our being. One of the most rewarding things that I hear is how teachers tell me that I've extended their career or I have saved their career or that they're having joy in their career. Students telling me the same thing. So that's what it does for me.
- [67:39]
B
That's fantastic. How can people learn more about you, about your work? I'm going to say the title of it's called the Thinking Building the Thinking Classroom in Mathematics. It's honestly, I'll tell you what it is. It's a. I have a name for this kind of book. It's a pattern book. And so there's a series of pattern books that I admire greatly. And one of them is Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which is about architecture. Then there's Slimymskis, the source of musical, of melodies and chord structures. There's one on cooking, there's one. And you find them and these are patterns that you can reproduce in the world and they will make people feel whole and alive, which is a term that was created by Christopher Alexander. So I love books like this. Where else can people learn about your work.
- [68:31]
A
There's a website, buildingthinkingclassrooms.com they can get the book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. You can buy it through pretty much any online bookseller. You can follow me on Twitter glilly, et al. Or thinkingclassrooms. But the most interesting place, if you want to learn about what's going on, is that there's over 35 Facebook groups that have sprung up. Oh, all under the heading Building Thinking Classrooms and then some subtitle. Just go into Facebook groups, search Building Thinking Classrooms and you are going to see 35 different groups. The main one has almost 50,000 teachers in it. These are. I haven't created any of these. These are communities of people who have come together to discuss and figure out how this, my work applies to their lives and to support each other in that journey. To me, that's, I think, the greatest accomplishment that I could ever ask for is that people want to pursue my ideas independently, in conjunction with other people. That I'm not the person who holds the choreography to this. I have given teachers a set of tools, patterns that they can recreate, but it's a problem to solve and, and the best way to solve a problem is to find a collaborative group and to work the problem together. And that's what they're doing.
- [69:56]
B
Thank you very much for coming on the show today.
- [69:59]
A
It's been my great pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [70:04]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.