Building Thinking Classrooms Online: From Practice to Theory and Back Again

In the COVID-19 era of adapting to pandemic lockdown protocol, teaching practices have become more negotiable and less tethered to the familiar and institutionally normative practices found in educational settings around the world. With a shift to online teaching, many practices are being adapted from face-to-face settings and being imported into online settings. However, this sort of adaptation is by no means trivial, and a direct transfer of practices may not necessarily be effective or plausible. While adaptation is undeniably necessary, a theory "for" teaching can offer guideposts around which adaptation may occur. Over many years of empirical investigation into how to enhance the synergy and capacity of students' thinking in face-to-face mathematics classrooms through systematically bypassing institutionally normative practices, the "Building Thinking Classrooms" framework offers a basis for one such theory. While this framework is used in many different contexts, one of these is in the education and professional development of mathematics teachers in tertiary and professional settings. However, with COVID-19 protocols in place, the tightly woven face-to-face practices of this framework had to evolve and be adapted. In this article, we discuss and exemplify how we drew from these face-to-face practices a set of principles, which served as guideposts for designing adaptations for engaging adult learners in mathematical tasks in a fully online setting. In our analysis, we consider not only the adaptations for online teaching we made, but the process of adaptation through a theory "for" teaching we used in designing effective and intentional learning settings for adults experiencing mathematics.