important for students to examine or that they think might be difficult for stu-
dents. However, it can be a challenge for teachers to include a wide range of
learners in whole-class discussions in a meaningful way.
Throughout this video, Dee Watson works hard to help all her students build
an understanding of division as they discuss a specific problem. She does so by:
- thoughtfully selecting a strategy to discuss that she thinks is accessible to a
wide range of learning and carefully deciding how they talk through and
record the strategy - responding respectfully and with interest to each student’s ideas whether
they are correct or not - asking questions about the specifics of the ideas students share
Examining the Video Footage
In this discussion, Dee Watson presents a problem to the students and they work
on solving it together. Students share their ideas about what they think is going
on in the problem, how they might approach the problem, and what they think
the answer is. The way Dee structures and facilitates the discussion helps surface
what students are understanding and not yet understanding about division. Dee
builds the discussion from the students’ ideas. This allows her to hear what they
are thinking right away. She treats each student’s responses with equal seriousness
and consistently asks them clarifying questions about what they said. This seems
to communicate to each student that there is something important in what they
are saying and to consider whether or not what they are saying makes sense. By
asking clarifying questions, Dee is able to dig into what their statements indicate
about what they are understanding and what they do not yet understand.
In the first interview, Dee talks about her decision to begin the discussion by
pursuing a repeated subtraction strategy suggested by a student. She chose this strat-
egy because she knew that it might be accessible to other students who struggle with
division. For students who struggle with the concept of division, using subtraction,
a more familiar operation, to solve a division problem may be a good entry point.
When doing repeated subtraction, one can actually see each individual group being
taken away and that the groups taken away are equal groups. These are important
concepts in understanding division, so it is an appropriate strategy to use early in
the year. Later in the year, Dee’s focus will be on helping her students move toward
using more efficient strategies for solving division problems such as using multiple
groups of the divisor or breaking the dividend into parts. By the end of the year, she
will expect the students to use more efficient strategies like these.
What Do We Do with the Remainder?