During the holiday break I took some time to reflect on my teacher inquiry so far. Wanting to build on the foundations of what I have in place I started looking at ways other teachers get the talk going in maths lessons. One blog I found highlighted the reasons why we talk about maths. The bullet points below are the main takeaway I took from this post.
- Talking about maths allows us to share our thoughts.
- Talking about maths helps us clarify our own thoughts.
- Talking about maths helps us understand what we do and do not understand.
- Talking about maths prepares us for the future.
I know I've talked about this with my students but I now need to check that they understand these reasons. Talking about maths allows us to think about our own understanding of a concept or strategy. It allows us to use our own connections to agree or disagree with an idea. The power here comes from being able to justify our thinking by using maths language and strategies to show others why we think the way we do. Additionally being able to see how someone else's thinking is a more efficient way to find the answer helps to close gaps in knowledge.
This week I introduced another idea I saw online. Instead of setting a challenge with an unknown answer I gave my students an incorrectly solved addition problem and challenged them to find, explain and fix the error. To help the talk flow I used the prompt 'How can you prove your answer is correct?' After solving the mystery the groups naturally moved around the room, eager to see if the others had found the error.
I stepped back and listened through the excited chatter to what was being said and heard that the LS2 Moves prompts we had been using, with absolutely no prompting from me, were being used to guide the conversations. The slide below shows the student voice collected. It was done very quickly but told me this style of facilitating conversation was a success.
I sourced this initial activity from Teachers Pay Teachers. My next steps will be to look at how I can incorporate and adapt some of the ideas in this resource to align with the content of our maths lessons.
This is early days but I can't wait to see where this type of maths challenge takes us.
HI Robyn, I like the idea of getting the students to find the error and fix it. A very practical way to solve the problem. It aligns nicely with your focus on discussion and I am sure the students found it very motivating.
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