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Season 2 | Episode 16 – Strengthening Tasks Through Student Talk - Guest: Drs. Amber Candela and Melissa Boston
- 2024/04/18
- 再生時間: 16 分
- ポッドキャスト
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あらすじ・解説
Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 16 – Strengthening Tasks Through Student Talk Guests: Dr. Amber Candela and Dr. Melissa Boston Mike Wallus: One of the goals I had in mind when we first began recording Rounding Up was to bring to life the best practices that we aspire to in math education and to offer entry points so that educators would feel comfortable trying them out in their classrooms. Today, we're talking with Drs. Amber Candela and Melissa Boston about powerful but practical strategies for supporting student talk in the elementary math classroom. Welcome to the podcast, Amber and Melissa. We're really excited to be talking with you today. Amber Candela: Thank you for having us. Melissa Boston: Yes, thank you. Mike: So we've done previous episodes on the importance of offering kids rich tasks, but one of the things that you two would likely argue is that rich tasks are necessary, but they're not necessarily sufficient, and that talk is actually what makes the learning experience really blossom. Is that a fair representation of where you all are at? Melissa: Yes. I think that sums it up very well. In our work, which we've built on great ideas from Smith and Stein, about tasks, and the importance of cognitively challenging tasks and work on the importance of talk in the classroom. Historically, it was often referred to as “talk moves.” We've taken up the term “discourse actions” to think about how do the actions a teacher takes around asking questions and positioning students in the classroom—and particularly these talk moves or discourse actions that we've named “linking” and “press”—how those support student learning while students are engaging with a challenging task. Mike: So I wonder if we could take each of the practices separately and talk through them and then talk a little bit about how they work in tandem. And Melissa, I'm wondering if you could start unpacking this whole practice of linking. How would you describe linking and the purpose it plays for someone who, the term is new for them? Melissa: I think as mathematics teachers, when we hear linking, we immediately think about the mathematics and linking representations or linking strategies. But we’re using it very specifically here as a discourse action to refer to how a teacher links student talk in the classroom and the explicit moves a teacher makes to link students' ideas. Sometimes a linking move is signaled by the teacher using a student's name, so referring to a strategy or an idea that a student might've offered. Sometimes linking might happen if a teacher revoices a student's idea and puts it back out there for the class to consider. The idea is in the way that we're using linking, that it's links within the learning community, so links between people in the classroom and the ideas offered by those people, of course. But the important thing here that we're looking for is how the links between people are established in the verbal, the explicit talk moves or discourse actions that the teacher's making. Mike: What might that sound like? Melissa: So that might sound like, “Oh, I noticed that Amber used a table. Amber, tell us how you used a table.” And then after Amber would explain her table, I might say, “Mike, can you tell me what this line of Amber's table means?” or “How is her table different from the table you created?” Mike: You're making me think about those two aspects, Melissa, this idea that there's mathematical value for the class, but there's also this connectivity that happens when you're doing linking. And I wonder how you think about the value that that has in a classroom. Melissa: We definitely have talked about that in our work as well. I’m thinking about how a teacher can elevate a student's status in mathematics by using their name or using their idea, just marking or identifying something that the student said is mathematically important that's worthy of the class considering further. Creating these opportunities for student-to-student talk by asking students to compare their strategies or if they have something to add on to what another student said. Sometimes just asking them to repeat what another student said so that there's a different accountability for listening to your peers. If you can count on the teacher to revoice everything, you could tune out what your peers are saying, but if you might be asked to restate what one of your classmates had just said, now there's a bit more of an investment in really listening and understanding and making sense. Mike: Yeah, I really appreciate this idea that there's a way in which that conversation can elevate a student's ideas, but also to raise a student's status by naming their idea and positioning it as important. Melissa: I have a good example from a high school classroom where a student [...] was able to solve the contextual problem about systems of equations, so two equations, and it was ...