3 Teacher Tips From NCTM 2019

As the education editor for Scholastic DynaMath and Scholastic MATH, I’m always looking to bring current education trends to teachers and students. Which is why I love the NCTM annual conference.

This year’s event was in San Diego, California, and if you weren’t able to attend, check out my top 3 takeaways from the conference.

“Think-pair-share” is a common practice that teachers use to promote student discourse. But Meg Knapik—a math coordinator in Chicago, Illinois—has added writing to the mix. The result? Think-WRITE-Pair-Share!

In her session, Knapik explained how some students need the opportunity to articulate their thoughts in writing first before sharing orally. This allows them to review their thoughts visually and then collaborate to deepen their understanding.

Think-WRITE-Pair-Share is just one way to encourage more reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the classroom. Here are Knapik’s other tips that teachers can use:

• Provide gallery walks so students can see other strategies and solving methods
• Pair mathematical vocabulary with images
• Create a “Seen Any Good Math Lately?” bulletin board
• Encourage math journaling
• Allow verbal and written opportunities for self-assessment and reflection

How can we keep students from being “number pluckers”? Try the 3 Reads Routine, which I learned from a session led by California educators Vicki Vierra and Jim Short.

With this routine, students read a word problem 3 times before jumping into a solving method. This teaches students how to think like a mathematician. And it allows teachers to incorporate productive struggle into their lessons. Here’s how to do it:

• First read—Build context: After reading the problem once, ask “What is the problem about?” This allows students to focus on the information and words, not the numbers.
• Second read—Restate the question in your own words: This helps students understand what the word problem is asking.
• Third read—Identify important quantities and relationships: This allows students to ask, “What information is important?” and then use it in a solving strategy. To help support this line of thinking, you can use these sentence starters: “The important quantities are…, An important relationship is…, They are related in…”

I loved what I learned from Meredith Scheiner and Erin Dougherty, math specialists from Pennsylvania. In their session, they explained how teachers can “flip” standardized questions to allow students more opportunities for multiple answers and strategies while still maintaining the skill and cognitive demand. They modeled how to take a closed task—where there is only one answer or one strategy—and flip the task to make it open-ended. Here are some examples.

Closed: The average distance from Earth to the moon is 238,885 miles. What is this distance rounded to the nearest thousand?

Open-ended: The average distance from Earth to the moon is about 240,000 miles. What numbers round to 240,000? How do you know?

Closed: There are 7 math folders on a classroom shelf. This is 1/3 of the total number of math folders in the classroom. What is the total number of math folders in the classroom?

Open-ended: There are 7 math folders on the pile. This is close to 1/3 of the total number of folders in the classroom. How many folders could there be in the classroom? Why does that many folders make sense?