Getting students to discuss their math thinking is not always easy. Students may struggle with staying on topic, explaining their ideas, or listening and responding to others. I’ve found that role-playing, having students act out behaviors in a math discussion, gives students the chance to inhabit the roles of speaker and listener and improve their abilities within those roles.

I’ve helped teachers use role-playing to focus on student engagement during turn-and-talk. Because students communicate simultaneously in pairs during turn-and-talk, they all get opportunities to share ideas and practice communicating prior to sharing with a large group. But even with turn-and-talk, students can have difficulties. Teachers have expressed the following concerns to me:

• Only one of the partners talks and the other is mostly unresponsive
• One or both partners talk about something other than the given topic
• One partner gets frustrated and only has negative responses
• The partners have different ideas and don’t seem to think about each other’s ideas

 

Here are some scenarios we’ve used to help students reflect on their roles in turn-and-talk and boost their participation.

Scenarios and Roles

To introduce the role-plays, I told the class that we were going to act out different turn-and-talk situations and think about how our discussions can help use learn. We gave two people student roles and one person the role of the teacher. The roles were explained to each actor, but not to the students in the audience. The audience was asked to watch carefully and try to remember how the students were engaging in turn-and-talk. I often started with one role-play where students communicated effectively and one where they did not. This helped us list the kinds of behaviors that made turn-and-talk work well.

The role-play scenarios focused on math ideas students were pretty comfortable with. That allowed students to focus on the behaviors, not the math.

Examples I have used:

Scenario 1: Discuss how you could use one multiplication fact to help you find the answer to a harder multiplication fact (discuss addition for 1^st or 2^nd)

• Roles:
  • Teacher – presents the question: How can you use a multiplication fact you know to help you answer a harder multiplication fact?
  • Student A – only talks about how the multiplication facts were so hard to learn
  • Student B- tells which facts they used to help them figure out other facts
• Variation to show effective communication: To show a more effective turn-and-talk, Student A responds to Student B by asking how they used one of the facts to help them solve the other fact, and this developed into a discussion

Scenario 2: Discuss the meaning of an unfamiliar story problem

Roles:

• Teacher – presents the story problem to the students and asks them to talk about the meaning of the problem (I chose story problems recently used in class)
• Student A- talks about the action in the problem and how the numbers are related; then talks about what they need to figure out
• Student B- just gives one word responses; doesn’t show understanding

• Variation to show more effective communication: As above, but Student A asks Student B if he/she agrees or has a questions and gets Student B to identify what they don’t understand

Scenario 3: Discuss why you can use adding on or subtracting back strategies to solve a problem asking how many more are needed

• Roles:
  • Teacher- asks students to discuss why they could use adding on or subtracting back strategies to solve a particular problem.
  • Student A- talks about why they think adding on is best
  • Student B- talks about why they think subtracting back is best

Scenario 4: (Based on my book, Hatching Butterflies): Discuss the meaning of a given problem, ex. Last year’s class hatched 21 butterflies. This year’s butterflies have started hatching. So far we have 8 butterflies. How many more butterflies do we need to hatch to reach last year’s record?

• Roles:
  • Teacher: Presents the new problem and asks students to talk about what the problem is about and how they might get started with it
  • Student A: Explains that they know how many butterflies have hatched and need to know how many more need to hatch to get to 21.
  • Student B: Nods
  • Student A: Says maybe they could take away the ones that have hatched already.
  • Discussion continues with Student B explaining ideas while Student A is pretty quiet.
  • Teacher stops the turn-and-talk and asks Student A to tell the class about the ideas they shared as partners.

Mechanics

As a math coach in classrooms with two adults available to model a role-play, I first had one student play the role of the teacher and the classroom teacher and I took on the roles of students. If I were the only adult in the room, I would rehearse with two or three students first, so we could model role-playing for the class.

After the role-play, I asked the audience to describe what they saw each person doing. Students are very observant! They described the behaviors so accurately. Once we agreed on the roles of the actors, we would talk about how the behaviors shown seemed to help or hinder learning. Again, the audience was reflective and spot-on. Then I asked them to consider whether a scenario like this might actually happen in class and what suggestions they had for how the students in situations like this could use turn-and-talk more effectively. Here it was a bit harder for them to focus their recommendations on the problem shown in the role-play, but they had lots of good recommendations! We posted a list of the recommendations and referred to them frequently.

Your classrooms

I wonder if you have used role-playing in this way or if you’d like to try it. I ‘d love to hear about your experiences or other ways in which you boost participation in discussions.

If you want to try using role-playing in this way, you may want to focus on turn-and-talk, or other aspects of discussions like students restating and rephrasing ideas asked in class or students working in pairs. Occasionally repeating a role-play, perhaps altering it a bit, can remind students about how they can engage more effectively.