Using Public Record to Scaffold Joint Sense Making

overrideBackgroundColorOrImage= overrideTextColor= overrideTextAlignment= overrideCardHideSection= overrideCardHideByline= overrideCardHideDescription= overridebuttonBgColor= overrideButtonText= overrideTextAlignment=

Keith Leatham and Blake Peterson along with several colleagues including former graduate student Sini Graff recently published an article titled “Using Public Record to Scaffold Joint Sense Making” in the Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12. Blake has answered a few questions about this article below:

Who were your co-authors on this article?

Ben Freeburn, Sini W. Graff, Laura R. Van Zoest, Shari L. Stockero, Nitchada Kamlue

Who would you say is the target audience for this article?

Mathematics teachers

What is the big problem you hoped to address with this article?

Media displays whether they be blackboards or document cameras or other digital displays are commonplace in a mathematics classroom and commonly used to create a public record of student contributions during whole class discussions. What are some effective ways to use public records to support student sense making during these discussions?

What are some of the key ideas in the article?

We offer three general suggestions in the paper with detail to support them

Make the public record precise
Purposefully organize the public record (the following questions may help with this organization)
1. How do these shared ideas fit into the ongoing argument?
2. How might these ideas help the class move forward in their joint sense-making?
3. How might the recording of these ideas help scaffold the class as they move forward in this joint sense making?
Take advantage of the public record

What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from this article?

Teachers would benefit from carefully planning their board (and other media display) organization as they plan their lessons. This planning should also include some thought about how student contributions will be added to the public record as the discussion unfolds. For example, placement and color of student contributions can help distinguish between them and yet placement and color can help students see parallel structure between contributions in order to make important connections between them.

In conjunction with carefully planning public records of lessons, reflection on a public record contributes to improvement in the use of it. By reflecting to see what aspects of the public record organization contributed to or detracted from students making connections, teachers can learn what structures to replicate or avoid in the future.