Activating Math Talk
11 Purposeful Techniques for Your Elementary Students
- Paola Sztajn - North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA
- Daniel Heck - Horizon Research
- Kristen Malzahn - Horizon Research
Corwin Mathematics Series
Check out these podcasts:
Teaching Math Teaching Podcast Episode 48: Paola Sztajn and Dan Heck: Activating Math Talk
https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/mathed/episodes/2021-06-15T11_13_31-07_00
Achieve High-Quality Mathematics Discourse With Purposeful Talk Techniques
Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum.
Framed around 11 student-centered discourse techniques, this research-based book connects purposeful instructional techniques to specific lesson goals and includes a focus on supporting emergent multilingual learners. You will be guided through each technique with
- Classroom examples of tasks and techniques spanning grades K–5
- Reflection moments to help you consider how key ideas relate to your own instruction
- Classroom vignettes that illustrate the techniques in action and provide opportunities to analyze and prepare for your own implementation
- Group discussion questions for engaging with colleagues in your professional community
Achieving high-quality mathematics discourse is within your reach using the clear-cut techniques that activates your math talk efforts to promote every student’s conceptual learning.
This book provides the perfect answer to the question, ‘How can I help students engage in high-quality math discourse in my classroom?’ The experiences of real teachers in real classrooms, brought to life through a series of vignettes, provide vivid illustrations of how the 11 techniques described can get students thinking and talking about mathematics. The book is a game changer for elementary teachers!
We’ve come a long way since discussion in math class meant that individual students shared their strategies one after the other with little interaction or reflection. This book is based on the premise that discourse skills can and must be learned and practiced if all students are to have access to participation in high-quality talk about significant mathematical ideas. Based on a decade of work with teachers and coaches, it provides clear, specific strategies illustrate d with classroom examples for supporting students as they learn how to talk, listen, and question during all phases of the math lesson.
Packed with powerful teaching ideas—there are so many excellent teaching strategies in this single book! A teacher could learn to implement one or two of these techniques and the book will have been worth its cost. It provided ideas that I wanted to try to implement RIGHT AWAY!”
This book does a great job of providing how-to steps that I was able to incorporate into my own practice. These techniques for discourse are appropriate for a wide variety of grade and skill levels. I especially appreciated the strategies for differentiation and for meeting the needs of emergent multilinguals.
We teachers know students can talk. But teaching how to talk to further mathematical understanding is challenging. Activating Math Talk gave me strategies to guide students, even reticent ones, into meaningful mathematical discourse. It challenged me to be more purposeful in ‘opening spaces for students to surprise you.’ It changed the way I taught and listened to students, making me a better teacher, and helped me create an exciting, respectful classroom environment where my students gained confidence and competence in building shared mathematical understanding.
Fostering a discourse-rich classroom is essential for emergent multilingual learners to develop deep understandings of mathematics. The authors provide the what, why, and how of developing meaningful learning communities through practical, research-based suggestions that teachers can take directly into their classrooms. The inclusion of excerpts from real classrooms allows us insights into the teachers’ and learners’ experiences as we learn how to center and foster language in the mathematics classroom. This book is a great resource for teachers and teacher educators who wonder how to help move the math forward while students are acquiring language.
This book is set up well for grade-level teams to do a book study and set goals for how they are working towards creating a discourse community in their classrooms.
This is a needed resource right now. We teachers just aren’t doing this in our classrooms and we need a resource to develop this aspect of our instruction.
