This Math Was Made for Talking: Targeting Math Discussions

As a visiting teacher, I love to ask students what they think a “number talk” might be. It’s usually silent at first, and then a brave soul will say something like, “Is it when you talk…about numbers?” Their faces light up when that profound idea is confirmed. I have been in countless elementary and middle school classrooms in the last few years both observing and facilitating Number Talks (Sherry Parrish, 2010), and I am part of an amazing team that has trained over 1,000 teachers on their implementation since 2013. Number talks are changing how teachers and students interact with mathematics by opening up the discourse in the classroom to more than just a volley between teacher, student, teacher, student. They invite students to construct and consider multiple strategies for a single problem or string of related problems, and serve as formative assessment for teachers who want to know how their students are thinking about a problem. While these “open strategy sharing” conversations are valuable in themselves, they also provide us with an opportunity to design a more targeted follow-up discussion based on student strategies. This idea comes from Elham Kazemi and Allison Hintz, authors of Intentional Talk: How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions (2014).

What does this look like in a classroom? Here’s an example of a poster from a number talk in a 2nd grade class:

Students used many different strategies for finding sums of expressions with three addends (the expressions above in blue). In the first problem, Yisel used a sum she knew (5+7=12), and then counted on from 12 (12+3) to get a sum of 15, while Johan made a ten from two of the addends (7+3=10) and then composed 15 from 10 and 5. The teacher shared with our team that making a ten had been a huge focus of their most recent work with addition strategies, and we saw an opportunity to invite students to more closely examine the counting on and making ten strategies. We designed a “Compare and Connect” discussion (Kazemi and Hintz, 2014) to take back to this class, and asked students, how are these strategies alike and how are they different?





By re-engaging students in their own strategies, we were able to target our discussion and support more students in considering a higher level strategy for adding. We finished up with an exit task to see what strategies students would use after our discussion.  18 out of 24 students made a ten! 

Come learn more about targeting math discussions at:

  • CMC North in Asilomar, CA (Session #258 This Math Was Made for Talking: Targeting Math Discussions) on Saturday, December 3 from 9:30-10:30 at Pacific Grove Middle School, Room 23
  • NCSM Annual in San Antonio (Session #114, Monday, April 3 from 11:15-12:15)
  • NCTM Annual in San Antonio (Session #473, Friday, April 7 from 12:30-1:30 at the Grand Hyatt, San Antonio in Crocket AB)




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rules vs. Norms

Image
As I reflect on teaching a week of summer school, I've been thinking about the difference between classroom rules and classroom norms. Before planning this week of instruction, I had never thought intentionally about the difference. In fact, I'm pretty sure I treated them like the same thing when I had my own classroom or at least thought that if I had rules, I didn't need norms and vice-versa. My last year in the classroom, I shifted to starting the year with "norms" instead of rules, but in retrospect, they were actually still rules... called norms. While rules and norms do have some things in common, they are are truly two different things that have effects on different dimensions of our classrooms. The intent of rules is to establish a safe and efficient learning environment and maintain some order to prevent chaos, while norms are about collectively deciding as a community how learning will happen - it seems to me that both are needed in all classrooms.
Read more

CMC North 2017: Mathematical Language Routines

Image
I still have sand in my shoes from CMC North this past weekend, and along with a major math hangover, that’s not a bad thing. I mean, check out this view: I got the chance to try out a new session with a fantastic group of participants ranging from 3 rd grade to high school teachers. Together we explored and experienced Mathematical Language Routines (MLR) from a powerful document that came out of UL/SCALE at Stanford this year. I first heard of MLRs when I was training to become a Master Coach for Illustrative Mathematics.  Their new 6-8 open source curriculum uses MRLs as supports for English Learners in a way that amplifies, not simplifies, the language of the mathematics. In addition to providing scaffolds for students to access the language, the 8 MLRs provide opportunities and structures for students to develop and communicate their own language. Here’s a cheat sheet: In my session we looked at a few of my favorite routines: Which One Doesn’t Belong? AKA WODB (an
Read more

Humanizing Math with #MathGals

Image
I'm honored to have been asked by Sam & Hema to be a keynote blogger for the conference. Make sure to catch up with all of the wonderful blogs, videos and tweets shared so far at  The Virtual Conference on Humanizing Mathematics . I've been thinking a lot lately about math as a  human  endeavor, and more specifically, how we humanize (read: make accessible, comfortable, welcoming to ALL people) a subject that has been historically considered a  masculine  endeavor. It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that a Google search for "famous mathematicians" in 2019 returns this slice of mostly old, dead, white-guy-centric history: Don't get me wrong. These (mostly) men above made fantastic, famous contributions to mathematics. But what baffles me is the glaring omission of the women who have made equally important and impressive impacts on the field. So, my act of humanizing mathematics is to change this narrative. Lately, I have been wor
Read more