Texas Mathematics Teacher Spring/Summer 2020 - 25

Good Mathematicians Use Math Talk
Putting it All Together
After teaching students all of the components, a typical
Math Workshop lesson would proceed in the following
manner. Students would be seated on the classroom rug
in their assigned positions with their assigned partners.
The students' attention would be directed toward the
teacher and an easel upon which the teacher has written
a mathematical question in one color and some sample
sentence starters, specific to the current question,
in a second color. The teacher poses the question to
the students, displays the potential sentence starters
associated with the question, identifies which partner will
make the initial response (A, B, or C), and instructs the
students to "turn and talk".
The students will turn and sit knee-to-knee with their
partners and the designated partner will respond to the
question that the teacher has posted on the easel. After the
initial partner has responded, the second partner would
show eye contact, repeat what the first partner said, state
whether they agreed or disagreed with their partner, and
state the reason for their agreement or disagreement.
Figure 4 illustrates some sample dialogue sequences.

Figure 4

These question stems help formulate good higher order
thinking questions that focus on the specific content to
be taught. It is advantageous to create questions and
sentence starters for a particular area of study prior
to group planning to promote meaningful discourse.
Creating meaningful questions can help you clear up
misconceptions, encourage rich academic language, and
develop a healthy mathematics environment. Model for
students the creation of questions and sentence starters so
that in the second term, typically after the winter holidays,
students can be given the opportunity to take ownership
of their own learning. Students can begin to write their
own question stems and sentence starters for upcoming
standards. I do this so that students will feel like they are
part of a learning community. Students get excited about
this opportunity as they become more aware of their
own mathematical abilities and knowledge. Figure 6 and
Figure 7 contain examples of student-created question
stems and sentence starters.

Figure 6

Suggestions for Advanced Preparation
In addition to the anchor chart about the overall
procedure (Figure 1), at the beginning of the year, I also
create another anchor chart that displays some sample
question stems (Figure 5).

Figure 7

Figure 5

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