Blake Peterson and Keith Leatham recently had a paper titled “Conducting a Whole Class Discussion About an Instance of Student Mathematical Thinking” published in the conference proceedings for the Psychology of Mathematics Education – North America (PMENA) conference. Blake has answered a few questions about this paper below:
Who were your co-authors on this paper?
Shari Stockero – Michigan Technological University and
Laura Van Zoest – Western Michigan University
Who would you say is the target audience for this paper?
The broad mathematics education community – both researchers and teachers.
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this paper?
Mathematics Educators often talk about the importance of using student mathematical thinking during instruction but what does that use really look like.
What are some of the key ideas in the article?
In our earlier work, we defined which instances are worth spending class time discussing. Generally these might be called teachable moments but we call them Mathematical Opportunities in Student Thinking (MOST). We have theorized and studied the practice of Building on MOSTs and one element of that practice is conducting a whole-class discussion about the MOST.
One element of the Building practice is conducting a whole-class discussion about the MOST. This article elaborates on that element. Specifically, when you Build on MOSTs, it is much more than a single move. After the class has been invited to make sense of the MOST, other students will contribute to the discussion and it is the teacher’s responsibility in conducting the discussion to decide which contribution will help the class make sense of the original instance. Thus, the teacher conducts a sense-making discussion about the MOST by integrating some contributions and putting aside others.
What else would you like to say about this paper?
It is important to keep the discussion focused on making sense of the object of discussion, the MOST. In our work, we have seen teachers pursue every student idea that surfaces, resulting in a discussion that meanders among ideas. Although it seems that teachers do this with good intent as a means of honoring students and their ideas, we argue that putting some ideas aside better honors the student who contributed the MOST by maintaining a focus on the important mathematics that they initially brought to the discussion.
Abstract:
Productive use of student mathematical thinking is a critical aspect of effective teaching that is not yet fully understood. We have previously conceptualized the teaching practice of building on student mathematical thinking and the four elements that comprise it. In this paper we begin to unpack this complex practice by looking closely at its third element, Conduct. Based on an analysis of secondary mathematics teachers’ enactments of building, we describe the critical aspects of conducting a whole-class discussion that is focused on making sense of a high-leverage student contribution.