Student Voices Matter

For the last couple years now, I’ve seen a trend turning in my classroom.  With the end-of-the-year evaluations I give my students, I have found that “math conversations” are on the rise as far as what student’s deem as their favorite instructional activity.  Let’s let this sink in.  Students are saying they like talking about math.  

Just yesterday we ended up having an 80 minute math conversation on why adding adding and subtracting integers works.  If you would have peeked in, you would not  have seen me in the front of the room giving direct instruction on how the rules work for each situation and then asking clarifying questions of my students.  What you would have seen instead, was just one problem on the board…-14 + 5.  You would have seen students writing about what they already knew about the problem.  You would have heard students sharing their thinking.  Intense discussions would occur as we ironed out the misconceptions.  As students shared their thinking, I would probe them for more precision whether it was in vocabulary or honing their thoughts to be more mathematically accurate.  I would model their thinking using numbers, a real life scenario, the number line, or positive/negative tiles so students also had a visual to attach to their learning.

After about 40 minutes, I announced that we were making headways in our understanding of adding positive and negative numbers.  The students were shocked. I could tell by their faces, and one student even exclaimed, “That just felt like 10 minutes!” 

After a quick brain boost, it really heated up when we started to analyze subtracting integers. We got four different answers to the one problem I presented!  Students were questioning….wondering...and trying to explain their thinking as we whittled away the incorrect thinking so we can see what was really going on. Or in other words, WHY it worked that way.

“Those that own the language, own the learning”. That is my goal this year....to get students talking and digging deeper into their mathematics.  When they start to wonder out loud they are giving me a transition to the next part of the lesson.  Student voices matter. It’s the only way we can see what they are thinking.