Random Groups

This week, I’m sharing insights I gained as I worked with a group of fifth graders to test drive the first three practices from Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC):

• thinking tasks
• random groups
• vertical, non-permanent surfaces (in our case, white boards from Wipe Book)

Today, lets talk random groups:

As Peter’s book suggest, the cards I handed out put fifth graders into groups of 2 or 3 and also told them where to go (based on their number) and what their job was: hearts get the task from the front of the room, clubs get the markers, and diamonds collect and bring me the cards. (The teacher had already put erasers at every station.)

As I shared last time, students did get to work right away on the Thinking Task they were given. The problem asks students to figure out how many cards are missing from a deck given certain conditions.

After one catch and release to help them notice a key component of the problem, I shifted my focus from WHAT they were doing to HOW they were working.

I heard one group immediately say, “Let’s try 50.”

They were dividing 50 by four when I paused to name their strategy. “Why 50?”

“I don’t know. I just took a guess.”

“Yes, you did. That’s a great strategy. We’d call it ‘Guess and Check.’ Keep checking.”

Another group had tried 50 cards and it hadn’t worked after the first test, so they immediately dropped to 49 cards to test that against the constraints of the problem.

“Ahh, this looks like a classic case of ‘Trial and Error,‘” I told them. “You tried 50, and it didn’t work. So now 49?”

“Yep.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then we’ll try something else.”

Still another group started systematically going from 50 to 49 and on, listing the number of cards left over, trying to satisfy the riddle’s conditions. “When I gave them the same problem, your teacher used the “Make a Table” strategy to organize her thinking.” They quickly reorganized their work into rows and columns.

Again, the best part came during the debrief when I asked them, “Why might we have put you in RANDOM groups?”

They recognized the power in working with new people and seeing new perspectives and ways of thinking. Fifth graders have it figured out! Check it out:

Stay tuned in the coming days as I share more about where explicit instruction fits into a Thinking Classroom as well as the third practice that makes up the first BTC “Toolkit”: vertical non-permanent surfaces.