Livingston should learn lessons from Berkeley Heights results and larger studies.

–Written by an Educator in our District

Dear Livingston Public Schools,

Please learn a lesson from Berkeley Heights Public Schools, among others, that Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) is not the best instructional approach, especially not preferred to traditional direct math instruction.

At your April 29th, 2025 Board of Education (BOE) meeting, your Assistant Superintendent Mark Stern went through Goal 2 of your Budget/Board goals for the 2024-2025 school year. The slide is below:

Mr. Stern mostly read off the slide and during that time, he stated:

“The budget also certainly helps bolster our professional development with Building Thinking Classrooms, our Math In Focus, and open Sci Ed, which we introduced [Open Sci Ed] in the elementary school this year, so thank you for all of that.”

Livingston considers BTC to be “vertical learning,” according to their recent “Livingston Mathematics in the Elementary World” presentation. It is our hope that this practice does not continue for Livingston students into the 2025-2026 school year. Here’s why:

Building Thinking Classrooms has a troubled history in Berkeley Heights that caught the attention of the entire Board of Education after a packed parent information session that was moved from the cafeteria to the auditorium (a larger space) after a large number of parents signed up to go complain. This all occurred in the fall of 2022 under a Superintendent and Math Supervisor who are no longer with the district, this math experiment being a part of the reason why.

But it’s not only Berkeley Heights:

“Bulding Thinking Classrooms is still nonsense”: This article explores how BTC is not supported by cognitive science, how BTC does not divide elements between group members evenly, cancels out explicit teaching, and that explicit teaching followed by problem solving was superior. The photo also has high school students standing on desks and ladders which could be wobbly and appear dangerous, but of course Building Thinking Classrooms can be done with feet on the ground.

“Peter Liljedahl wants to make kids think about mathematics”: The title is misleading as Liljedahl is the founder of BTC, but goes onto explore that students were not ‘thinking’ when exploring math problems and instead students were ‘mimicking’ and not thinking, that classrooms are disorderly (as seen in Berkeley Heights), and overall confuses students and puts them into overload.

Parent survey (conducted by NJ21st): Overall themes include students being confused, decline in student math grades, and that Berkeley Heights at that time should stop BTC.

NJ21st allows for confidentially sourced articles from employees of local government agencies or volunteers of non-profits whose organizations would take retaliatory action against their employees and , in the case of volunteer organizations, officers for exercising their right to express an opinion about local government. We have verified the confidential source for this article and have met with him/her face to face.

All NJ21st articles on Building Thinking Classrooms

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