If you’ve been with me in a professional development session or read my work, there is (at least) one clear theme that emerges: I’m a huge proponent of getting students talking in secondary math class. Teachers who I’ve just started working with sometimes are skeptical about why that’s important. Isn’t it easier just to have some well-structured examples and notes for students to take? This helps them get exactly what I want them to get from the lesson. Talk is messy! Shouldn’t we be doing I do-You do-We do?
Here’s the short answer to those questions: The person doing the talking is the person doing the thinking. We want students to be more than just passive receivers of mathematics information. That can help build memorization skills and the ability to reproduce a set of steps without having to think much about those steps. But if we truly want students thinking and reasoning about mathematics and understanding the why, not just the how, they need to be the ones doing the talking. And talking isn’t just answering a question that we ask teachers ask with a very definitive answer to it. It’s making arguments to one another, to us as the teacher, challenging thinking, working through in-progress thinking, and developing their own understandings and pathways through the mathematics.
As teachers, that changes our role from the person who packages and shares the information to the person that steers and shapes the conversation through good questions and comments to help our students arrive mathematically where we want them to be. This feels messy and uncertain when you first do it, but frameworks like the 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Discussions can help you shift the discourse in your classroom to be able to reconceptualize your work in planning for and leading such discussions.