I'm in my second year of teaching math. I currently work in LA, teaching Integrated Math 1 to 9th graders.
Today I was lesson planning. At this point in the year though, pretty much anything is preferable to lesson planning, so I took a break to read the CCSS ELA Anchor Standards. The Anchor Standards are roughly the ELA equivalent of the Standard Math Practices.
I wanted to start thinking about the language side of what my students are learning. I figure that I will be a more effective teacher if I’m at least partially aware of what is being taught in the other classes.
Here’s what I read (emphasis my own).
"To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations—as part of a whole class, in small groups, and with a partner. Being productive members of these conversations requires that students contribute accurate, relevant information; respond to and develop what others have said; make comparisons and contrasts; and analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in various domains."
My typical lesson structure is about 25 minutes of group or individual work followed by about the same amount of time in whole class discussion. The discussion is centered around the problem and content that students just worked on.
The curriculum I use is called Interactive Math Program (IMP), and nearly every problem in IMP comes in a concrete context. A ‘context’ is really just a story. These contexts are complex and get developed over an entire unit. Setting the problems in a context with which the students are more fluent makes the constraints feel more concrete. This, in turn, allows students access to more complex problems. The idea is that, as these students become proficient in content areas, the abstract mathematical constraints begin to feel just as concrete to the students.
When the quoted paragraph above says that “to build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations”, the implication is that "structured conversations" aren't just a teaching strategy for accessing the ELA curriculum, they are the ELA curriculum. That is, part of what is taught in an ELA class is the ability to engage in meaningful discussion.
I try to facilitate meaningful discussions in my class, but until now I had just thought of them as a teaching strategy to help students learn my math content. Now that view might be changing, and I'm considering that part of what I need to be teaching students is how to engage in discussions. After all, it is important that our students grow up to be able to thoughtfully engage in meaningful discussion so we can avoid this:
