Brodie (2007)

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Teaching With Conversations: Beginnings and Endings

Abstract

A key focus for developing teaching approaches in many countries is supporting learners' conversations about their mathematical thinking. Conversations allow learners and the teacher to consider, question and add to each other's thinking and to co-produce generative mathematical ideas and connections. Conversations require genuine communication among classroom participants Communicating mathematics is an important mathematical practice, which supports other mathematical practices such as connecting, generalizing and justifying ideas.

Research in mathematics classrooms where conversations take place suggests that developing and sustaining these conversations is extremely challenging and demanding on both teachers and learners (Chazan and Ball, 1999; Lampert, 2001). Guidance to teachers on how to work with mathematical conversations often does not go "beyond telling teachers not to tell" (Chazan and Ball, 1999). I suggest that we will make progress in understanding mathematical conversations if we consider that they have different phases, which require different kinds of work from teachers. I focus on two important phases of mathematical conversations: beginnings and endings. Drawing on a recent research study [1] with high school mathematics teachers in Johannesburg, South Africa, I address the questions: How do successful conversations begin in mathematics classrooms; and, once they are in progress, how are they successfully concluded?

Corrolary

APA
Brodie, K. (2007). Teaching with conversations: beginnings and endings. For the Learning of Mathematics, 27(1), 17–23. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40248555
BibTeX
@article{Brodie2007,
author = {Brodie, Karin},
journal = {For the Learning of Mathematics},
number = {1},
pages = {17--23},
title = {{Teaching with conversations: beginnings and endings}},
url = {http://www.jstor.org/stable/40248555},
volume = {27},
year = {2007}
}