Launching a Learning Classroom

Garfield Gini-Newman

September 6, 2025

Welcome to another school year, sure to be filled with exciting challenges and rewarding opportunities. Over my 42 years in education, I have always found the beginning of a new school year to be exhilarating, to the point of having trouble sleeping the night before the first day of classes. Ripe with possibilities and filled with the unknown, launching learning with a new group of students has been what has kept teaching fresh and new for me.

For much of my career, I have striven to create a climate where all students have the opportunity to flourish in a welcoming, engaging, and hopefully transformative learning space. With this goal in mind, launching a thinking classroom has fascinated me.

Early in my career, I quickly developed a distaste for the traditional routines of the first day of school: assigning seats, establishing rules, distributing textbooks and sharing course outlines. By the end of the day, students sat in classes with eyes glazed over, and disengagement was already setting in. I wanted to find ways to hit the ground running, with students quickly engaged in active learning environments where they came to believe that their voices mattered and that they sensed they were in for an exciting ride ahead.

As I reflected on how to best launch a thinking classroom, I came to realize the need to attend to the following issues:

• What was the best way to create the physical space where genuine collaborative thinking could flourish?
• How could I de-centre the classroom so I did not inadvertently send a message that learning
  is controlled by and flows from the teacher?
• How could I nurture a flourishing learning environment where students embraced failure as
  opportunities for learning and saw learning as a garden to be cultivated?
• How could I structure learning in my classroom that helped students see the value of slow
  thinking rather than quick answers, becoming comfortable with ambiguity and patient
  cultivators of wisdom?

Exploring answers to these questions led me to realize that launching a thinking classroom does not happen in a single day. It is the slow drip of inquiry over time, during which student curiosity is fed, opportunities to revise thinking are abundant, and the celebration of the process of thinking takes precedence over the products of thinking.

On my journey toward effectively launching a thinking classroom, these practices emerged:

1. Put away the course outline for a few classes. Welcome children into their learning space, watch a provocative movie, listen to a song that challenges us to think, or play a game that will help you get to know your kids as learners. Use the first few days to cultivate relationships and get to know those with whom you will be joining on a learning adventure.
2. Present a course-long provocative throughline question that anchors the learning in your class. Is Canada the country we need it to be? Who from our past should we thank, and to whom should we apologize? Can understanding science help me live the good life? Can math lie? Are the arts a mirror of the present or a portal to the future?
3. Employ “prospective thinking” (future-oriented thinking) to help students connect their learning to the practical work of contributing to building stronger, more caring communities.
4. Seize on pop culture to connect learning to children’s interests and lived experiences.
5. Pay attention to the power of routines (how you greet children, how you dress, where students sit, how the room is reconfigured to match various learning activities). Understand that routines create a sense of predictability and safety. Research has found creativity tends to flourish where students feel safe.
6. Celebrate sound answers over correct responses and especially celebrate the courage to consider alternative perspectives and to change your mind when warranted.
7. Use questions that invite thinking and rich tasks as invitations to learn rather than proof of learning. This happens when provocative questions launch the learning and rich tasks anchor the learning, allowing students to iteratively grow and refine their responses.

The least helpful advice I received early in my career was not to smile before Christmas. This advice was grounded in the belief that I had to establish who was in control. If we hope to establish truly thinking classrooms, the mantra of not smiling until Christmas is a contradiction.

I quickly realized that if I wanted to establish a thinking classroom, children had to see themselves as having agency over their learning, and the hallmark of success could not be mimicking and replicating my answers. It had to be a space where students reached their own thoughtful conclusions. Certainly, my job was to help students develop the tools for thinking, including building their background knowledge. But in a thinking classroom, it is not my job to teach answers to the questions that matter. It is my job to inspire, support and celebrate students on their journey of learning.