Blog 3- This Week's Readings

Chapter 9 of Classroom Discussions. This chapter provided advice and examples for including productive discussions in math lessons. One of the most important pieces of advice was to carefully plan where discussions would be introduced in the lesson by noting where students would likely be confused, creating high level questions that require students to form a response about their reasoning, and planning out the talk moves to use. The chapter also discussed the best situations to use different talk formats such as small group, partner, and whole-class.

Atkins- “Listening to Students”. This article presented a case study of an educator introducing discussions to groups of fourth grade students and what she discovered from listening to their responses. She presents summaries and some transcripts of mathematical discussions with these students based on the meaning of volume, negative numbers, and how angles are measured. Important ideas she highlights are how conversations can help reveal students’ mathematical misconceptions, the way the layout of the class for conversation can influence interaction, and the importance of student-student interaction.

Stein- “Mathematical Argumentation: Putting Umph into Classroom Discussion”. This article provides ideas for encouraging more student discussions in middle school math classes and moving away from teacher-centered lessons to one’s where students work together to make meaning. Stein says that the task to be solved greatly influences the quality of discussion and gives an example of one task she believes is good for sparking discussion. The article also provides ideas and examples for facilitating a good discussion and reviews some of the research on the benefits of discussion in math classes.

Kazemi- Discourses that Promote Conceptual Understanding. In this article, Kazemi compares the type of classroom talk observed in two teachers’ classrooms. She describes how both teachers approach discussing the same mathematical task with their students. One teacher demonstrates “high press” with her students, the act of constantly questioning them and encouraging them to explain their thinking and justify it, while the other teacher does not show the same level of questioning. Kazemi explains the benefits of using “high press” in math lessons. The article ends with advice for teachers in examining their practice and implementing “high press.”