Seminar 2 - Talk Moves

Prompt #4: Which of the talk moves seem the most natural for you to use or see yourself using the most? Why?

After reading through the five talk moves – revoicing, asking students to restate someone else’s reasoning, asking students to apply their own reasoning to someone else’s reasoning, prompting students for further participation, and using wait time – the talk move that seems the most natural for me to use or the talk move that I see myself using the most is, revoicing. One major reasoning for why I feel I would use this talk move the most is because I already make use of it daily. Having been in the child development program at Michigan State, we were taught how to use this talk move and I have utilized it ever since. However, after reading more about this talk move in Chapter 2, I am now exposed to its positive effects it can have when teaching my students. Revoicing can help students understand what their classmates are saying and it allows them to interact with each other in a way that will continue to involve the students in clarifying their own reasoning (Chapin, O’Connor, Anderson, pg. 12). When students have the ability to clarify their own reasoning, they become independent and aware of their own thinking processes which can help with problem solving and mathematical tasks.

Not only does revoicing help the students learn how to clarify their own reasoning, but it helps us teachers understand any misconceptions that our students may have. Once a misconception is made, as teachers we can immediately help them work through those misconceptions and find a way for them to understand and/or comprehend what is really being said or happening in the lesson/activity. Also stated in Chapter 2, revoicing is, “an effective move when you understand what a student has said but aren’t sure that the other students in the class understand” (pg. 13). When one student has an idea and others might not understand what that child had to say, it is nice to have the ability to revoice their idea so that the other student’s idea can become available to others. This then in-turn creates a classroom discussion, and provides more “thinking space” as Chapin, O’Connor, and Anderson stated. “It can help all students track what is going on mathematically” (pg. 13)!

Seminar 2 Blog Post

Prompt #3: Looking at your case study, how did student talk deepen the teacher’s understanding of his/her students’ thinking?

Case 2 describes a first grade teacher’s use of student talk to help her teach geometric shapes. Specifically, Mrs. Sigler’s first grade class is learning about what makes a shape a triangle. During the first day of her lesson she had students work in small groups to sort shapes into two categories—triangles and other. As she made her way around the room, stopping to work with individual groups, she noticed that most children were only placing equilateral triangles in the ‘triangle’ group and putting isosceles and scalene triangles with other shapes in the ‘other’ group. After talking with one group and asking children to defend their choices, it was clear that their understanding of triangles was limited. Most classified their shapes as triangles because “it just looks right.” From asking each student in the group to think out loud, Mrs. Sigler learned that they were relying on limited previous knowledge about triangles (i.e. seeing the shape on a poster in the classroom) and had little or no understanding of the actual properties of triangles. It’s important to note that the teacher asked each child to speak and elaborate on one another’s thinking in order to assess each student’s beliefs; she wasn’t correcting them or leading them to new understanding.

Through the student talk Mrs. Sigler facilitated, she gained a deeper understanding of her students’ thinking and could adjust the following day’s math lesson appropriately. In particular, she learned that she needed to focus on the generalization that all three-sided shapes are triangles. As a result, during the whole class lesson the following day, Mrs. Sigler spent a lot of time making sure her students understood this, as evidenced by her asking students (with different looking triangles) to share their shape and number of sides (always 3) with the class. This helped students make the connection with all triangles and three sides.