"I Want To Get Them To Say It"

This is an idea I see and hear a ton, both at my school and on the internet. While I think it has a ton of value, I want to clarify what it means for me, and why a commitment to "get them to say it" worries me a bit.

The good: First, the spirit of "I want to get them to say it" is totally in the right place. If a kid can produce an idea, it's going to be more connected to their prior knowledge, more meaningful, and better grounded in the mathematics being learned than if it is pushed on that student. The idea as a whole isn't what I'm worried about -- it's the implementation in the classroom.

The less good: Common classroom situation: class is exploring a new topic. Kids are trying to figure something out -- let's say it's angle rules for polygons, or finding the axis of symmetry for a quadratic. Nothing too crazy. Kids work, discuss, blah blah blah. Teacher asks a leading question -- "so what can we say about X?"

In some lessons, the whole class, or the vast majority of the class, has figured it out. Boom. Awesome. Great teaching. But sometimes, there are a bunch of wrong answers. What happens then? It seems like a common teacher move is to keep asking leading questions, so that the sequences goes question - wrong answer - question - wrong answer - question - right answer - teacher validates right answer. It's student-centered, blah blah blah, but really only one kid is saying it, and I am still the answer key that the class is leaning on.

That second scenario is what my classroom looked like pretty often last year. It worries me because it creates the illusion that the entire class is moving from not understanding to understanding. What I think is actually happening, for a significant portion of the class, is they hear another student's answer and think "I wonder if that's correct?". Then my response, whether implicitly or explicitly, indicates it's wrong. Wash, rinse, repeat, until someone gets it right, I tell them they're right, and we move on.

I think this can work really well for the top 30 or 50 or 80 percent of a class. But for kids who math doesn't come easily to, their experience is that in math, you guess an answer, don't worry about evaluating the reasonableness of that answer, and the teacher tells you if it's right or wrong. I feel like that builds learned helplessness, wastes time taking a roundabout route to mathematical conclusions that does nothing for these students' learning, and removes meaning making from mathematics, at least for this group of students.

What I'm trying to do instead: What I am working on in my classroom this year has two parts.

Part one is taking these moments in class, and using partner talks, test cases, and everything else I can think of to have students evaluate whether their claims are reasonable. This goes way beyond improving my poker face to creating opportunities for students to evaluate and make meaning of the math -- and most importantly, instead of one kid saying it and moving on, I get 25 kids saying it. That difference is huge.

Part two is knowing when I'm reaching for something I'm not going to get. If I have kids explore a new topic, and they're written work and initial discussion shows that most of the class is confused, or has unproductive misconceptions, or just isn't in a place where I feel like I can move them to understanding, I own that, and feel comfortable doing some explaining, or reframe the task, or choose a new example to try.

Maybe this isn't anything revolutionary, but the shift from some kids figure something out and I tell the class that it's right to some kids figure something out and the class as a whole evaluates their ideas and decides what makes sense has been a big focus of mine this year.