Article Summaries

Chapin, O’Connor, Anderson. (2009). Chapter 9: Planning Lessons – The chapter about lesson plans really lays out the lesson plan that Chapin, O’Connor, and Anderson feel is most effective. The lesson plan that they use has five components, these components are, identifying the mathematical goals, anticipating confusion, asking questions, managing classroom talk, and planning the implementation. This lesson plan focus’ highly on using talk to learn mathematical and how important it is to think about the mathematics prior to teaching the lesson. This in-turn will help keep the focus of the discussion on the students’ understanding and helps the talk move forward so the goals of the lesson are addressed.

Stein, M.K. (2001). Mathematical Argumentation: Putting the Umph into Classroom Discussion – Centering your classroom discussion on mathematical tasks does not have to become a routine, or how Stein puts it, “the IRE routine (teacher initiation, student reply, teacher evaluation)” (Stein, page 110). Instead, as the teacher you can step back and let the students do all the thinking and discussing. The teacher’s role then becomes to simply encourage risk taking and alignment with one position or the other in the debate, or to just be there to revoice and clarify student discussion.

Atkins, S. (1999). Listening to Students: The Power of Mathematical Conversations – This article focuses on the importance of the teacher taking a step back and allowing the students to do more of the talking as well as leading classroom discussions. When the teacher steps back and becomes a member rather than the leader, it opens up more relationship building between the students where they are being challenged and reconstructing each other’s ideas.

Kazemi, E (1998). Discourse that Promotes Conceptual Understanding – In Kazemi’s article, the point that is being made is what it means to “press” students to think conceptually about math. It is important that teachers help students build on their thinking so that their problem solving and conceptual understanding can increase. Kazemi also states in this article the importance of students make use of reasoning that justifies procedures rather than statements of the procedures themselves (Kazemi, page 410).