Teacher Appraisal Inquiry 2014- Increasing engagement of mathematical discussions

Teaching as Inquiry-  Central School 2014

Judith Van Kooten      Year 2 class

Inquiry Question

Can I see evidence of increased engagement of my students to articulate and explain their mathematical thinking using teacher talk moves?

Knowledge:

This year Anne Fromont explained to the staff at a staff meeting about Teacher Talk moves. Unfortunately I was absent from this session. Later on we had another maths session with Rhion from Toi Tupu Maths advisory- who demonstrated the talk moves.  Later in the term Anne visited classrooms to view lessons and to model teacher talk moves if required. 

As result of Anne’s visit and follow up discussion of the lesson- it became clear to me that I was affirming responses, therefore cutting the conversation, rather than promoting discussion to allow the children to decide if their answers were correct.

On 19th June I went to an Alim maths training day and as part of the training we looked at Teacher talk moves. After completing the following readings, “Effective Pedagogy in Mathematics”, by Glenda Anthony and Margaret Walshaw and “Academically Productive Talk: Supporting Students’ Learning in Mathematics”,   by Suzanne H Chapin and Catherine O’Connor I could see how the teacher talk moves would give more power to the discussion and ownership of the task to the children therefore making the learning stronger. 

Anne had offered from her first visit to provide me with a copy of some talk move cards as prompts for child discussion, so I asked for a copy and then placed them on the main board. I also researched other examples of use of teacher talk moves- from internet sites.

eg.

http://www.sas.com/images/landingpage/venues/mathsummit/2013/119CrystalCabralMathTalkSAS-Particpant.pdf

When Anne returned for a second observation I had not yet had much time to practice using teacher talk moves due to hosting a student teacher placement, however she commented that there were more valuable responses from the children and lots of questions at her second observation.

I decided to pursue the use of teacher talk moves and to try and encourage the children to be more actively involved in lesson participation. 

Although I recorded some earlier maths discourse using the Explain Everything App- unfortunately these recordings were inadvertantly wiped by our ICT Technician.

Therefore my evidence has to be more recent recordings of discussion

Evidence: (RTC11)

I recorded some group lessons and then later assessed the samples of the lesson for talk moves.

The results were

 Lesson about adding using doubles  ( Each mark is one time in the ten min sample) 17/9/14

	Revoicing	Repeating	Reasoning	Adding on	Wait time
Teacher	111	111111	11	111111
Children (with T prompt)	11	11	11	11
Children  (without  T prompt)	111111	1

Engagement: The children were all fully involved in the discussion and were offering ideas over the top of each other. Together they explained and joined in the discussion- often without T direction. From this sample I discovered that I was often prompting for the children to repeat what had been said and to add further to the discourse. What was notable was the lack of wait time. Often when asking for further info the children responded with revoicing and each child tended to revoice their thinking to convince the group once another child had revoiced.

In the second example with the same group of children

2+6+7-8   later rewritten as  2+6-8+7       Sample taken on (22nd September)

	Revoicing	Repeating	Reasoning	Adding on	Wait time
Teacher	11	11	111	1111111
Children (with T prompt)	11111		11
Children  (without  T prompt)	11		1	1

In the second example I could see that the children are getting better at revoicing and were pointing out mistakes and explaining why there were errors. The children were all using whiteboards and were fully engrossed in trying to solve and discussing how they had solved. Interestingly at the start there were a variety of answers but each child had a reason. Oscar was able to realise that he had made an error -when explaining his thinking and was then able to resolve. 

Next moves:

This group of children are more engaged in their mathematical solving. They enjoy the challenge of finding an answer and then explaining it to others. As a teacher I am still too much in control of the discussion and have not yet allowed enough wait time for the children to take on the questioning role. 

With this group I plan to next use the maths talk move cards for children in the group time and allocate them all a card to try and use in the discussion. It will be their job to then take even more control of the discussion. 

I have introduced and used the Explain Everything app with this group, but discovered long pauses with no recording as they experimented with using the app. Now I think the children are more confident in talking and they will be better at using this app to explain their problem solving strategies. I plan to continue to monitor their problem solving using this app. This will also ensure that I do not dominate the conversation and questioning. To encourage talk I plan on having groups of 3 or 4 at each task.

Attached  Video clips of class discussion used in this report.  

Response from Maxine ( Colleague)

Name	Big question/Title	My key response	My Question	Possible Further action
Judith	Can I see evidence of increased engagement of my students to articulate and explain their mathematical using teacher talk moves.	Affirming responses therefore cutting discussions, reflective on how much wait time was actually used.   Good to see that videoing is a great reflective tool. What is the Evidence that a difference has been made?	What did you actually change – Using the cue cards did they make a real difference? How will I ensure that I give wait time?	Put the answer up on the board – model one or two and get students to discuss what the easiest (most effective) strategy was. Continue to film and critique your practice – use this for your RTC evidence

Response from Bonnie ( Colleague)

Name Judith

Big question/Title Can I evidence of increased engagement of s to articulate and explain their mathematical thinking using teacher talk moves?

My key response Jnr maths teaching requires a lot of teacher lead instructions.  I’m really interested in finding out about how Judith uses teacher talk moves to support her learners.

My Question How will you continue the momentum of teacher talk moves in mathematics?

Possible Further action Give students the problem and the answer and ask them to discuss possible strategies.

Response from Sarah ( Colleague)

Name	Big question/Title	My key response	My Question	Possible Further action
Judith	Can I see evidence in increased engagement of my students to articulate and explain their mathematical thinking using teacher talk moves?	It was interesting to see that by stepping back and allow the students to direct the learning that the students were more engaged in the mathematics. Was it because of the ownership of the learning?	How will you work on  your wait time?	Could use this for mix abilities? Cement others strategies when others are learning a new strategy.