Everyday at PCMI, we're doing an hour-ish of reflecting on practice. Today, we talked about productive discussion in the classroom and watched a video of Cathy Humphries teaching a 7th grade class about dividing fractions. We spent the whole time watching, re-watching, reading the transcript, discussing and even arguing (with evidence) how "good" the class conversation was. After all that, they showed us a rubric to help us discuss this in our future conversations, and I thought it was really awesome.
The rubric is from an article in the November 2007 issue of Mathematics Teacher called "Let's Talk: Promoting Mathematical Discourse in the Classroom." Enjoy! I'm blogging for speed rather than depth, but I think this alone could be food for months of study.
Does it stop at 3?
ReplyDelete4 - Students push each other to make their arguments more precise/clear/convincing. Students take each other's doubts seriously and work together to resolve disagreements and confusing points. Few or no students appear willing to allow the conversation to proceed if they are confused or unsure of the direction it is taking.
5 - Students pose the questions that the class engages.
Small World! The workshop that Dot and I organize got started yesterday (yes, I do have too much to do to be keeping up with our web reading. This is one of our articles! Great to see it posted.
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