Theorizing a Teacher Developmental Progression for Establishing a Thinking Classroom

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

The publication Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (BTC) generated remarkable worldwide interest from mathematics teachers, contrasting a marked resistance to instructional change in secondary mathematics classrooms over the past four decades. BTC’s practices align with existing research, yet create opportunities for support and coaching to fill gaps in addressing the needs of all learners. This paper uses narrative inquiry to capture the experiences of a first-year teacher whose read of BTC launched classroom experimentation in a high school with a high percentage of minoritized youth. The narrative highlights key obstacles and underscores the value of additional resources and coaching, grounded in mathematics education research, to sustain the momentum for classroom change that BTC inspired. As the teacher shifted from non-curricular to curricular tasks, new challenges emerged, requiring strategies such as high-leverage practices, conceptual models, and piloted task sequences. Findings situated in this teacher’s case illustrate a developmental progression of instructional shifts that characterize this teacher’s changes in practice towards student thinking-based instruction. This series of instructional shifts provides a testable model for future research. This model holds implications for supporting coaches and teacher educators in strategizing and targeting stimuli for teachers’ adaptive teaching as they learn to enact and fine-tune student thinking-based instruction inspired by BTC.

DOI

10.1007/s10857-026-09750-5

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