In this article in Mathematics Teacher, Texas math educators Priya Pierre-Louis, Laura Godard, and Margaret Pearce describe Thinking Notes as an adaptation to Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms process. Here’s what led to the idea.
In the middle of a BTC class, with students working standing up in groups of three solving a challenging calculus problem at erasable whiteboards, the teacher noticed an error being made by all the groups. Getting the attention of the class, the teacher provided an explanation that got students back on track.
But the teacher (and colleagues in similar situations) noticed that some students “felt uneasy moving on without a detailed, teacher-guided, written synthesis,” say Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce. “They valued collaborative discovery but wanted reassurance from the teacher about the precision of their understanding.”
That’s what sparked the idea of Thinking Notes. “Instead of providing prewritten notes,” say the authors, “we co-create summaries with the class after problem-solving sessions. These notes are not ‘examples and answers’ but rather artifacts of our collective reasoning” – including graphs and diagrams, insights, generalizations, and examples and non-examples that surfaced during the all-class discussion.
The Thinking Notes are captured in the class’s digital notebook, say the authors, forming “a bridge between the spontaneity of thinking tasks and the students’ desire for precise records for future reference.” At each of these “pause points” in a lesson, “students independently decide whether to record notes in their notebooks, often adding to the student-created notes they have already written during group work.”
The Thinking Notes provide “a shared, vetted synthesis that students can draw on as their understanding continues to develop,” say Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce. “While still grounded in student language and reasoning, Thinking Notes benefit from teacher facilitation and tend to be more conceptually coherent, mathematically precise, and reusable as reference for future tasks, assessments, and revision.”
The authors report that this adaptation of Building Thinking Classrooms has resulted in students being more confident with subsequent tasks: “For some students, the obstacle was not a lack of ideas but uncertainty about whether their thinking was ‘correct’ enough to share publicly. The Thinking Notes phase reduced this risk by positioning ideas as provisional and open to refinement. As a result, several students who were hesitant to speak during group work began volunteering contributions during notes creation, knowing their ideas would be examined and revised collectively, rather than evaluated individually.” Quieter students contributed more at the whiteboards and in all-class discussions.
Thinking Notes, conclude Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce, “have had a profound impact on our classroom culture. Students report feeling empowered because they are the authors of the mathematical ideas recorded: their language, reasoning, and representations shape the notes. At the same time, students experience a sense of security through teacher facilitation as their collective thinking is affirmed, refined, and validated for mathematical accuracy. This combination allows students to take intellectual risks during exploration while trusting that misconceptions will be surfaced and addressed during synthesis. This process has helped us, as teachers, slow down and honor moments of deep reasoning before moving to the next task.”
“Thinking Notes: Co-Constructed Reflection” by Priya Pierre-Louis, Laura Godard, and Margaret Pearce in Mathematics Teacher, September 2026 (Vol. 119, #9, pp. 748-751); Pierre-Louis can be reached at pierrelouis@gmail.com.
Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1155 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.
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