Student Spotlight: Using teacher prompts to encourage students talking like a mathematician

By Laura Teague, Möbius Maths Hub Secondary Assistant Maths Hub Lead

Recently, the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Providers work group visited The Willink School to observe a lesson and reflect on the teacher interactions which they then discussed afterwards. The instruction for ITT participants was to pick out a ‘key learning moment’ for students in the lesson and unpick teacher choice and decision making in that moment, and then how students learned from that moment as a result of teacher choice.

Most participants picked out this moment in the lesson:

Here, three mini whiteboards were selected to discuss the different methods for expanding a pair of binomals.

The initial question was (𝒳+5) (𝒳+2) and students were asked to expand, using a representation or diagram.

An area model has previously been used to expand a single term and binomal bracket, but no teacher guidance had yet been given on how to tackle this new problem.

The main three responses were selected and shown to students:

One of the teacher prompts to elicit this discussion was, ‘what’s the same and what is different’?; which as part of the reflective discussion was exemplified as a particularly supportive and engaging prompt for students. Contribution as a result of this prompt was that “students were happy to critique each other’s work in an open and non-judgemental way.”

The use of student whiteboard responses along with the teacher prompt, encouraged healthy debate and a lengthy student discussion about variation in methods and the benefits or disadvantages of each.

The exercise really encouraged students talking as mathematicians!