“I don't know what to do.”
“Is this right?”
“Can you help me?”
“I can't do it.”

 

Elementary educators hear these phrases every day.

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Young learners are supposed to need support—but they also need opportunities to develop the confidence, flexibility, stamina, and independence to navigate challenges without immediately relying on an adult to solve the problem for them.

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How do we intentionally build those capacities?

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This interactive full-day workshop explores how thinking, productive struggle, collaboration, and purposeful play can help K–5 students become increasingly independent learners and problem solvers.

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Drawing from Peter Liljedahl and Maegan Giroux's Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classroom, Grades K–5 and Howard Moody's The Heart of Play, participants will experience and examine practical ways to create classrooms where children learn to try, struggle safely, collaborate, adapt, persist, and try again.

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Through hands-on tasks, collaborative problem solving, playful learning experiences, reflection, and classroom application, educators will consider how everyday instructional decisions can either strengthen—or unintentionally reduce—student independence.

 

Research & Resources

Building Thinking Classrooms in the Elementary Grades

Using practices and tasks from Peter Liljedahl and Maegan Giroux, participants will explore ways to increase student thinking, collaboration, autonomy, perseverance, and problem solving. Rather than immediately providing answers or rescuing students when they struggle, educators will examine ways to create the conditions, prompts, tasks, and supports that keep students thinking.

 

The Heart of Play

Using Howard Moody's work on purposeful, socially engaged play, participants will experience how carefully facilitated play can provide a safe space for children to practice flexibility, communication, appropriate risk-taking, problem solving, connection, and coping with things not going exactly as planned.

Together, these approaches provide educators with practical ways to intentionally build the skills students need when learning becomes challenging.

 

Participant Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Identify classroom practices that build—or unintentionally inhibit—student independence.

• Apply age-appropriate Building Thinking Classrooms practices in K–5 settings.

• Use purposeful play to strengthen problem solving, flexibility, collaboration, communication, and coping skills.

• Create opportunities for students to experience productive struggle in emotionally and academically safe ways.

• Respond differently to common student help-seeking behaviors without withholding needed support.

• Use questioning, hints, collaboration, and task design to keep students thinking when they encounter difficulty.

• Distinguish productive struggle from frustration that requires additional scaffolding or intervention.

• Intentionally build students' stamina and capacity to persist when an answer or solution is not immediately apparent.

• Adapt strategies for developmental differences across the K–5 continuum.

• Develop practical routines and experiences that can be implemented immediately in elementary classrooms.