Continuing to Find Ways to Build Math Talk

I have participated in a number of professional discussions in the last week around the concept of Number Talks.  You may remember that I blogged about Sherry Parish's book before. It is an excellent resource to help you get started with Number Talks.

Many classrooms use Number Talks every day.  It is a great tool for building mathematical discourse, exposure to new strategies, and strengthening students' flexibility and fluency.

However--some people are a little intimidated by Number Talks.  It has some elements of the unknown, and this makes teachers a little leary to try it with their own students.  This is totally understandable.  One way to make this work is for the teacher to work on the anticipation part of the number talk fully.  By anticipating all of the possible ways a student may respond, it will give you the preparation to feel confident as you step into the Number Talk.  It will also allow you time to prepare visual images to represent ways that the students might explain.  It is important that we show the students' ideas using visual representations as this will allow us to reach more students.

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Here is a great example of ways that students might see 18 x 5.

I do believe that the term Number Talk is broader than just the use of functions with numbers as is found in the Number Talks book.  Of course, traditional number talks often involve quick-look cards and other visuals to help students visualize the math, but they are still considered to be from the basic concepts presented by Sherry Parrish in her book.

If you click on the tab labeled Routines located at the top of this page, you will find links to resources and videos of a large variety of mathematical routines that will encourage students' math talk.  There are many low-floor/high-ceiling activities which are good to put the students (and sometimes the teacher) at ease when doing a number talk.  In these types of tasks, nearly everyone can find an answer right away, but because these routines lend themselves to multiple answers, we find students recognizing all kinds of things besides the obvious.  Using these type of routines in addition to Number Talks will help your students to grow in ways you won't believe!

Challenge yourself to something new.  Try to add routines to your math class each day--you will be glad you did!