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ERIC Number: EJ1378872
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023-Mar
Pages: 10
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0025-5769
EISSN: EISSN-2330-0582
Available Date: N/A
Building Equitable Math Talk Classrooms
Fuson, Karen C.; Leinwand, Steve
Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, v116 n3 p164-173 Mar 2023
Many teachers around the country are doing Number Talks in their classrooms. This powerful and accessible technique can open teachers' eyes to how their students talk about their own thinking and can help students see themselves as mathematical thinkers and describers of their own thinking. Teachers use annotations of student thinking to visually capture different ways that students arrive at both correct and incorrect solutions, opening the door to powerful discussions of conceptions and misconceptions. Students are generally engaged, and they are communicating mathematically and learning to value alternative approaches to doing mathematics and communicating and thinking mathematically. Too often, however, this magic of Number Talks is encountered only as part of classroom openers and fails to be transferred to mainstream or core mathematics instruction in the form of a consistent student-engaged Math Talk Classroom. Additionally, Number Talks tend to gradually disappear as students progress into middle school, and they are very rare in high school mathematics classrooms. It is also concerning that the traditional approaches to Number Talks entail the teacher being the recorder and not the students presenting their work. Moreover, the adherence to only mental mathematical approaches limits the inclusion of pictures and other critical representations and the difficulty of problems. Given these common observations and concerns, this article aims to stimulate an expansion of the Number Talk technique throughout the grades and into high school, to broaden the use of Number Talk techniques into core lesson instruction, and to relax some of the strictures considered by some to be "the right way" to do Number Talks so that students can more frequently do their own recording and, when appropriate, can use whiteboards or pencil and paper to support their thinking, and can use multiple representations.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 1906 Association Drive, Reston, VA 20191. Tel: 800-235-7566; Tel: 703-620-9840; Fax: 703-476-2570; e-mail: publicationsdept@nctm.org; Web site: https://pubs.nctm.org/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Education; Junior High Schools; Middle Schools; Secondary Education; High Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A