Imagine you are a student at the Faculty of Natural Sciences. You arrive for a theoretical exercise session (TØ). Your instructor brings a somewhat complicated exercise and asks one of you in the class to solve it. On the blackboard. Alone. In front of all your fellow students. Would you volunteer?

If the answer is no, you are like many of the students that Associate Professor Steen Thorbjørnsen meets as a teacher.

That is why, together with educational consultant Louise Kobek Thorsen and Professor Asger Hobolth, he is launching a new project to rethink how TØ sessions are taught.

They plan to introduce the Building Thinking Classrooms concept, which in its basic form consists of students working together in small groups, all standing at blackboards and solving problems at the same time.

“We hope this will encourage students to participate more actively in class and actually benefit from the teaching. The theoretical exercises are crucial in mathematics, because this is where you really get the material under your skin,” says Steen Thorbjørnsen.

The DKK 1.7 million provided by Novo Nordisk Foundation’s PREPARE grant will, among other things, be used to purchase enough blackboards to cover all available walls in the institute’s classrooms.

According to Steen Thorbjørnsen, there may be several reasons why students are reluctant to go to the board, but one of them is that many are afraid of making mistakes.

It is a perfectionist culture that he and his colleagues want to move away from in the classroom.

“It’s not that making mistakes is fun in itself, but standing there, trying to follow your intuition, and figuring out why something maybe didn’t work after all—that’s how you learn. That’s exactly what you should be doing in TØ,” he says.

Steen Thorbjørnsen still remembers the TØ sessions from his own days as a math student. Even back then, it was difficult to get students to the board one at a time.

“Ideally, the classic model can be a good form of teaching, but it requires everyone to engage. I’m really looking forward to making it more attractive and interesting for students to take part,” he says.

The Building Thinking Classrooms concept was originally developed for teaching in primary and secondary schools. Professor Asger Hobolth first heard about the idea of multiple blackboards from his wife, who teaches in high school.

He set up a classroom and tested the method on one of his own courses with master’s students.

“Asger found that the students showed up and were all active. They also developed a stronger sense of community because they worked together across groups during the semester. It was such a positive experience that he actually ran the entire course—including lectures—in that way. He went all in,” says Steen Thorbjørnsen.

For him, developing mathematics teaching is important because it represents a major part of the impact the Department of Mathematics has on society.

“We need to educate qualified young people who have learned mathematics and the mathematical way of thinking and working. We know that’s in demand in society and industry,” says Steen Thorbjørnsen.