In a math talk community students learn together and help each other. Partners share responsibility for understanding problems they solve.

What if partners aren’t sharing the responsibility for their work? Sometimes one person’s ideas dominate and the talk becomes a monologue with little opportunity for learning together.

Can we help students learn to work well with a variety of people?

In a recent Teaching Children Mathematics article, a fourth grade teacher explains how she has encouraged more productive math talk in her class.  (Click here for article.)  She lists 5 steps that helped her.

The author explains how her class explicitly discussed the importance of math discourse throughout the year and how they gradually learned the skills of active listening, revoicing, responding, and justifying ideas.

When students see that discussing ideas helps them all learn, they engage in more productive discussions in large groups, small groups, and in pairs.  Just as the article’s author reminds her students more and more frequently to use active listening and revoicing, we need to regularly remind students of our math talk expectations.

Then surprising things can happen!  Here’s an example from  Use Your Math Power: Hatching Butterflies.  In the beginning of the story, Carlos does not ask his partner Hannah questions about her strategy, even though he doesn’t understand it.   He just copies her work.  Once their teacher reminds them to discuss their ideas, Carlos gets Hannah to think about a different strategy.  

This led to  the students reasoning about why they could use addition or subtraction to solve the problem.  As a math specialist recently observed after reading Hatching Butterflies, “they both grew. Hannah couldn’t even describe why she did take away. Carlos knew where he wanted to go with his method, and he forgot to add up the jumps. He grew in his understanding as he shared in front of the class.”

When students share ideas, they often get to think about refining their ideas and connections between different strategies, deepening their math understanding.  This is the richness of math discourse and the power of paired work!