This session has reall relevance for us in the primary school. I think the idea of the Number Talk has great potential for us. The number talks provide students with ways to share their thinking,
clarify their thinking and create a visual image to show their thinking.
All these come together to help students come to a deeper understanding
of number particularly and Maths generally. Focusing on just one problem allows for the depth of thinking required to enagage with a problem at a conceptual level rather than a procedural level.
I know many teachers already use something similar when sharing student work but maybe not in a deliberate way. Maybe having a name for this pedagogical strategy would be helpful. I'm not sure I have seen the strategy go as deeply as creating the visual to show student thinking and I think this is an area we could explore more. I really think there is potential here for challenging some of our more able students.
I would like to see teachers use number talks more in classes and hope that through discussion, collaboration and sharing of ideas this can happen- maybe sharing one of the videos in a grade level meeting would be helpful?
The session once again makes me consider the role of the teacher in Maths teaching- putting forward a problem and teasing out the different ways of looking at it from different students rather than teaching a strategy and practicing it on differnt problems.
As Joy noted in her post-I think we do have to think about the anount of sitting and listening students do and this will be the challenge for the teacher-engaging all students a all times. I think in Primary the number talks would benefit from more 'turn and talk' time or working together to create the visual representation of their thinking.
I like the idea of bar-modelling for thinking about problems- this is an inetersting blog post with more details: https://thisismyclassroom.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/throwing-out-that-old-rucsac/
