Building Thinking Classrooms is Repackaged Discovery Learning – Education Rickshaw
In education, nothing is truly new. Consider project-based learning, which made its debut in the 18th century under the guise of “The Project Method.” Inquiry-based learning has similarly worn many hats over the years, from discovery learning to exploratory learning to experiential learning. As the veteran teachers have long said, everything old becomes new again.
We would do well to heed the lessons of history. The labels we assign to instructional methods often serve as convenient conversational shorthand, but they can also obscure the true nature of the pedagogy. Take “Balanced Literacy,” for instance—essentially a rebranding of Whole Language. The word “Balanced” was doing a lot of heavy lifting in masking the weaknesses of the approach.
Fast forward to 2025, and “Building Thinking Classrooms” has captured the imagination of adoption committees who have eagerly embraced its philosophy. Yet, beyond superficial “innovations” like vertical whiteboards, this approach is strikingly similar to the integrated math programs that many school districts—mine included—abandoned in the early 2000s after students’ test scores took a nosedive. Does it really need to be said that children struggle to discover abstract concepts (that could just be explained) when their teacher is the surrounding kids who also do not know the math?
For a deeper discussion of these issues, I highly recommend the podcast linked above. In it, Anna Stokke and I unpack the damage these recycled ideas have inflicted on classrooms and advocate for the only viable alternative: explicit instruction grounded in the science of how children learn.
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