EDUC115N Review #7

Now we are getting into the meat of this course. The work of developing a growth mindset is a year-long pedagogical guiding point, one that needs to be taught, developed, revisited and reflected upon, but what should the day to day math lessons look like? I know some big ideas have been mentioned in the class, and here in this blog. Students need to make sense of numbers, talk with each other when trying to solve problems and be given the space to think creatively about math, but again, what about specific lessons.

Enter Number Talks. An idea and a method of teaching that can be used everyday in the math classroom, in order to increase fluency and automaticity, and, at the same time, help students with the conceptual understanding of numbers.

Not Quite what I meant

Number Talks is all about freeing a students mind from thinking that there is only one way, one right way to solve problems in math, and it works like this:

1. Give a problem with the instructions that you can't write it down or use the traditional method of solving it. ex) 18 times 5
2. Have students share and describe how they got to the correct answer. At this point students are learning a) how to talk about numbers or b) how other students think about numbers.
3. Talk about the different methods that are used. Here the teacher can step in and create visual representations of the student's explanations. Many of the rules of mathematics can be explicitly taught here.  

Having kids solve problems in different ways teaches them number sense. It teaches them the ability to break numbers apart, or decompose the numbers, and regroup them. This ability is a key foundation for all of math. It also teaches that math is creative and flexible. With activities like number talks students walk away from their math lessons understanding numbers, instead of blindly remembering and following formulas.