3 Tips for Meaningful Math Talk

Watching a roomful of students talking openly about math is inspiring. Some of my favorite classroom visits have been when I saw this in action.

Although it takes time and effort, the results do pay off! Here are a few tips you can use in your classroom to make sure all students are having meaningful, productive conversations about math.

Before students begin solving a math problem, ask them: What do they notice? What do they wonder? These questions can help students spot patterns and approach problem solving in a friendly, open-ended way.

NCTM offers a great activity series on this topic that you can read more about here.

Before she joined us at Scholastic, education editor Lauren McCrone was a math teacher and coach. And she spent a lot of time asking “how” and “why” questions in her math classrooms, such as “How did you know that?” and “Why did you do that?”

Eventually, her students began asking each other the same questions during the time she set aside for math group discussions.

A poster or anchor guide can help with this process. In our October issue, we produced a math talk poster, which includes phrases to promote productive math discussions. Check it out by clicking the image below, or visit our STEM Pinterest page.

I loved watching Leah Alcala’s warm-up routine, “My Favorite No,” on the Teaching Channel. The middle school math teacher puts a problem on the board and has each student solve it on an index card. Then she collects the cards and looks for her favorite wrong answer. Together, the class analyzes the mistakes.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” she says. Yet “a mistake is your opportunity to share with me how much you understand,” she says. You can watch the 5-minute video here.