One new thing at a time...

The principle of productive talk that stood out most to me is trying one challenging new thing at a time. Being in a first grade classroom I have found that attention spans run particularly short. It is important that you are not loading too much information on them at once because they most likely will not be able to process and comprehend five new concepts. That is why it is important that you are using consistent terminology and routines that are familiar to the students before introducing challenging new material. “When introducing a new talk format or move, make sure that the mathematical concepts or procedures you are talking about are familiar to all of the students in the class.” (pg 108) I think this is a useful tip across all subjects. In math particularly the language used can be challenging for some students especially when it is first introduced.

One math lesson about geometric shapes my CT introduced the shapes in a whole group discussion. As a follow up activity we split the class into two groups. The students had never been split up in that manner before and we did not have any “established” norms for this kind of a group discussion. The students that were in my group were very off task. They did not know how to respond to the questions they were being asked and I think since it was a smaller group many of them were weary to answer. This did not produce a productive conversation about the topic. We then did the same activity in a whole class discussion and it went much better. Everyone was on task. I also think the activity did not go as well the first time because we were sitting on the floor instead of at their tables and they were not used to that for math. As the book says it is important to introduce one challenging idea at a time and I think that split class activity had too many new things in it and the students could not focus.