From reading the Fair or Unfair case study, I have a better understanding of how the talk move of repeating can be used to further students learning. Before reading this case study I had never been able to picture how this talk move would really be helpful. My mentality was more “why have students say something that has already been said?” If done in my class I pictured students repeating verbatim what another student had said or students saying “I couldn’t hear; everyone was talking,” which is already a popular phrase in my room.
In this case study it seemed the students who repeated what their peers said often clarified what their peer had said. It seemed to help the understanding of the class as well as the understanding of the student was being repeated. One specific example of this was during the first part of the discussion when one student was talking about trickery in regards to fairness and another student repeated her while including ideas of having equal chances of winning.
Throughout this discussion, I also noticed how the Mr. Donnell liked to resurface misconceptions that had been brought up earlier. As a teacher I instinctually would want to steer the conversation as far away from these misconceptions as I could. Yet, as I noticed how this lesson unfolded I can see how there might actually be more benefit from addressing these misconceptions right up front than pushing then under the rug. Conveniently in this conversation, all of the misconceptions seemed to be resolved by themselves by the time Mr. Donnell mentioned them again. I think it would have been more interesting to see how the teacher would have handled the discussion had the misconceptions still been prevalent. In my classroom misconceptions seem to die hard. I can see myself getting frustrated and just feeding them what fairness is in a mathematical context. Part of me thinks that first graders just need things stated obviously sometimes while another part of me really wants students to figure deep concepts like that out by themselves. I guess this just goes to show how much I still have to learn as an educator.
For this chapter it was helpful to have a transcript of the lesson rather than just a summary because when lessons are summarized they are often exaggerated or generalized in some way and it is harder to tell what outcomes such a discussion should really produce.
