Math Talk!

My class is a noisy one, not all of the time of course, but most of the time.  I have very chatty students who love to socialise, and I am endeavouring to use this to my advantage.  Learning is often a social pursuit, and as my students told me on Thursday, "Math is easier and more fun when you are working with a partner.

To this end, I have been explicitly teaching how we speak to one another about Math, how we question and comment to promote one anothers' learning.  We created a "Math Talk" Anchor chart, (which really comes from one of our Ministry's Inspire Monographs).

http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/Bruce.pdf

I've been teaching Math through problem-solving, hoping that for the most part, the students will be constructing their own learning.  I admit, this has been challenging, but we are making progress!  The first issue was that the students really didn't have much "stamina" for solving problems.  I got a lot of "I don't get it"s and "I need help"s.  I decided to do something that one of our Secondary Math coaches, Aldona, suggested.  I decided to teach the 4-part Problem Solving Model explicitly in parts.  First we just focused on the first part - Understanding the Problem.  I realised that this was mostly a reading comprehension issue.  So we talked about our Reading Strategies, and we realised that "Visualisation" can really help when trying to understand the problem.

Then we started to focus on choosing a strategy to solve the problem.  We are creating a class anchor chart for problem-solving strategies.  So far on our chart we have:

• Guess and Check
• Use smaller numbers
• draw a picture or diagram
• make a chart or table
• use an equation

I decided to deal with the "stamina" issue by using "Parallel Tasks" (see Marian Small's Good Questions on my Favourite Resources page).  Parallel Tasks are essentially different problems that each focus on the same Math concept (or Big Idea), but they range in difficulty.  Those students with little stamina could do the simpler problem.  I also decided to use "Open Questions" (also from Marian Small).  Open questions are questions that have more than one solution, so students have multiple entry points into the problem and can work at the problem at their own level. 

This really helped.  The students are starting to improve on their ability to stick with a problem.  So then I wanted to work on their ability to have a "Math Conversation".  This turned out to be something I had to explicitly teach as well! We tried posting all of our work and using a "Gallery Walk".  You can read all about the Gallery Walk and other ways to promote communication in Math in the Capacity Building Series Monograph: http://www.edugains.ca/resourcesLNS/Monographs/CapacityBuildingSeries/CBS_Communication_Mathematics.pdf

I armed the students with sticky notes and asked them to write comments on one another's work.  Their comments were mostly "Neat work" or "Great job!" or "You need to include words".  Not what I was looking for at all!  I realised I had to model how to write comments as well.  

Slowly but surely we are getting there.  Scroll down to see where we are at now. 
                                                                   

 I've been experimenting with how to add text to my photos.  I did these using "Paint".  However, I kept getting this white dotted line, some sort of glitch I think, and even when you click on the photos, they are too small to see my captions. Anyhow, if you know of another program or application I can use to add text to my photos, please leave a comment and let me know!  I can use all of the help I can get.

Here is an example of Parallel Tasks and an Open Question.  

After the Gallery Walk, we had a class discussion about the different solutions.  Students are beginning to see the connections between addition and multiplication, between t-charts and skip counting, and how the multiplication and division are simply inverse operations.

During the Gallery Walk, students could see that there were different strategies to solve the same problem.