Teaching Children How to Use Language to Solve Maths Problems

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What did the thinking together lessons involve?

Each teacher was provided with 12 detailed lesson plans, and given training in how to apply them. The first five were designed to raise awareness of how talk could be used to work together and established a set of ground rules which could generate talk of an exploratory kind. The following seven lessons were designed to enable pupils to apply these talking skills to the year 5 maths curriculum.

Each of the lessons was split into three:

a teacher led, whole class introduction
a group discussion activity, and
a final, whole class session in which ideas were shared, and there was room for reflection on the class as a whole.

In the final seven lessons, the discussion was focused on a specific talking skill and a particular curriculum concept such as reasoning about number relations. These lessons were also used to reinforce the skills learned in the earlier classes.

The researchers included samples of class interaction in this study, to illustrate the strength of these methods:

Teacher: So if I walk around the classroom while everybody is talking together in their groups I wonder what kind of things might I hear people saying?

Asif: 'What do you think?'

Teacher: That's a good one. Why is that an important question Carl?

Carl: Because you ask someone else their opinion.

Sarah: 'I think this because.'

Teacher: Why did you add 'because' at the end of that sentence?

Girl: Because then they know why you made that remark.

Teacher: Well done. Brilliant. You need to explain so that everybody understands what you think.