By now, you know the numbers.

The National Assessment of Education Progress, aka “the Nation’s Report Card,” reports that from 2020 through 2022, during the throes of the pandemic, average standardized test scores for age nine students dropped five points in reading and seven points in mathematics.

While research suggests those numbers have started to climb, the data offered a window into an otherwise unprecedented crater in core academic achievement, particularly in mathematics, which had never before experienced such a precipitous drop.

As conversations about how to close learning gaps gather steam, a movement toward teaching the art of thinking vs. critical skills, or rote tasks, is taking hold in America’s classrooms.

The author of Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC), Simon Fraser University professor Peter Lilijedahl has found himself at the forefront of that conversation. BTC, as it’s commonly known, is a research-backed teaching model that emphasizes student collaboration, discussion and teamwork as a tool to get kids moving around the classroom, talking to one another and solving problems.

Defined by the presence of several vertical, erasable whiteboards and students standing in small groups solving problems, BTC combines 14 distinct teaching practices to shape a new kind of classroom environment designed to foster thinking, instead of merely doing.

“What collaboration forces students to do is talk to each other,” explained Liljedahl on a recent episode of The RocketPD Podcast. “And why do we want students talking to each other? Because externalization of thought is a way of organizing and structuring our thoughts. And it makes our thinking better. That’s what collaboration is about.”

While the program — and Liljedahl’s ’s first book — focused on K-12 Mathematics classrooms, BTC has quickly expanded to other subject areas and disciplines, from Language Arts, to Social Studies, to Science.

In a recent interview, I asked Liljedahl why it’s possible for teachers to easily expand BTC to other disciplines, despite the lion’s share of the initial research having been conducted primarily in K-12 mathematics classrooms.

His answer? Research suggests that every academic discipline can be boiled down to seven types of learning activities that most teachers ask students to do.

#1 Deductive. Used commonly in mathematics, deductive learning activities ask students to use deductive logic to expand their knowledge in other areas. Explains Liljedahl: “If I know how to add fractions with common denominators, I can actually use some logic to get to different denominators and mixed fractions and so on.”

#2 Analytic. Seen mostly in the humanities, analytic learning says, “I’m going to give you a poem, I want you to analyze it,” explains Liljedahl. It’s about looking at information, like in Language Arts, and breaking that information down to reach a conclusion based on the information we have.

#3 Exploratory. Closely linked to analytic, exploratory asks students to go find something and analyze it. Rather than giving them a text, for example, we ask students to find a series of historical documents, then analyze those documents to reach a conclusion.

#4 Creative. Rather than analyze a text, creative learning asks students to create one, explains Liljedahl. If analytic learning is 50 percent of traditional language arts curricula, creative learning is the other 50 percent.

#5 Apprenticeship. Consider the performing arts. Before you can make up your own dance routine, you often learn to dance by following a specific choreography and apprenticing under an instructor who teaches you the order and steps. This is a big one in technical disciplines such as metalwork, textiles, nutrition and more, says Liljedahl.

#6 Factual. “There’s just things we’ve got to learn: names, dates, places,” explains Liljedahl. “There are a lot of nouns, right? We see a lot of factual learning in biology, history, earth science. It’s the only one that is inherently not a thinking activity. We have to work really, really hard to turn it into a thinking activity. This is the one that took the longest for me to try to figure out and there are some little techniques that we’ve developed.”

#7 Immersion. This one is not as big in classrooms, simply because teachers don’t often have that kind of time. But it happens a lot at home. Liljedahl gives the example of his children liking classic rock. Where did that come from? Long road trips forcing them to listen to his music! “I didn’t teach my kids classic rock on these trips,” he says. “They were immersed in it. And that is a form of learning.”

By substituting your academic discipline of choice with the type of learning activity that you want students to do, Liljedahl says you can apply his process for building a Thinking Classroom to nearly any K-12 subject area.

Says Liljedahl: “The nice thing, if you read the book, is that the book gives you an implementation schedule. It says, ‘This is how you start. This is what you do next. This is what you look for.’ Your subject-matter expertise helps you turn any subject into a Thinking Classroom, because you are the expert on the subject and you’re the expert on your context and the kids.”