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What’s Another Way to Make 9?

Building Understanding Through Math Talk

Christina Myren

What can we do to encourage young learners to participate more fully during
whole-class discussion, especially those who are struggling with mathematical
concepts and ideas? Often teachers find that these students are not active partic-
ipants in these discussions. To solidify their understanding, it is particularly
important for these reluctant students to be able to focus on the concepts being
presented, make sense of the strategies being discussed, make connections with
their own learning, and take risks to ask questions and discuss errors. By partici-
pating in the mathematics community, they will be more likely to see themselves
as learners and become more invested in learning mathematics. When I work
with new teachers, I try to model how to engage a range of students in class dis-
cussions and how to use the class discussion to assess student understanding. The
whole-group discussion can be particularly difficult for new teachers to manage
because it may be unfamiliar for teachers in mathematics class and because com-
ments from a wide range of students can be difficult to sort out “on the fly.”
Fostering whole-group discussion as a way to include all learners became the
basis of my work with Sarah, a first-grade teacher. This was Sarah’s second year
of teaching, but her first year with first graders. The previous year, I worked with
her second-grade students, so she was comfortable having me in her classroom. I
initially worked with her students daily for fifteen or twenty minutes. My goal was
to find out what they knew about numbers and to help them record their knowl-
edge in little spiral notebooks we called “number books.”
To introduce the number books, we began with the number 1. I wrote the
numeral 1 on the board and asked the students, “What other ways can we show 1?”
Students’ ideas included the word one,1 penny, a domino showing 1, 1 triangle, 1
person. I made a representation of each of their suggestions. Martin held up 1 finger
and said, “We could draw a hand with 1 finger. When I go to my sister’s soccer game
it means that they are the number 1 team.” Next, I asked if anyone knew a number