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How can sentence frames be used during activities? How might they differ by activity phase?

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How can sentence frames be used during activities? How might they differ by activity phase?

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Math Accountable and Academic Talk Stems

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Math Accountable and Academic Talk Stems

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How can sentence frames be introduced to students?

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How can sentence frames be introduced to students?

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Talk Stems for Peer Feedback

Peer feedback stems guide students in giving and responding to feedback.

The student using talk stems to provide feedback is guided to select specific information or to dig into their thinking in order to fulfill the specificity of the sentence stem, thus upping the rigor of the learning experience.

The student who is responding to the feedback is provided with meaningful, timely feedback that allows them to revise their thinking and work, thus growing their understanding. Also, the student responding to feedback can use sentences stems to ask for greater specificity, examples, or to disagree, so that they can interpret and act on the feedback.

Accountability measures, revision time, and clear expectations significantly increase the impact of peer feedback.

Implementation Steps

1. Select/create a few sentence stems to meet feedback and content objectives such as the I Like, I Wish, I Wonder Peer Feedback Protocol. Remember to include stems for responding to feedback.
For example, students could give each other feedback on a presentation with: I like...., I wish...., and I wonder...., I liked that too, because ...., Could you tell me more about....? or, I respectfully disagree with...., because....

2. Test your feedback sentence stems while looking at an example of student work. Things to consider:

Is the feedback task too broad or narrow? For example, students might benefit from separating feedback on writing mechanics from feedback on writing content.

Is the feedback-giving task directly related to the content/skills objective?

Will the results of the feedback be immediately actionable? Feedback gets stale if it isn't acted on immediately. The time to revise thinking and work is in the moment of the feedback.

Is the task worthy of peer feedback? This is variable depending on the grade level and skills being learned. Having students examine each other's writing for the use of a period at end of sentences is appropriate for first grade, but not as a solo task for third grade.

3. Incorporate the feedback stems into the assignment documents, so that students do not have to shuffle papers or tabs to move from feedback stems to the work receiving feedback.

4. Establish with students clarify and specificity on what appropriate feedback is and isn't. Display this information on an anchor chart and refer back to it proactively.

5. Model giving and accepting feedback using feedback talk stems. Have students observe and share what they noticed:

Was the feedback clear?

Was there enough information?

How do you think it felt for the person getting the feedback? For the person giving the feedback? (Was it respectful? Was it helpful?)

6. Have students practice with a partner while you observe. Try not to intervene or help.

7. Debrief the strategy with students.

What worked?

What didn't work?

What can be done to improve our talk?

8. Create greater accountability by closing with a share out, asking students what feedback they received, and then asking the student's partner why they gave that feedback. This is another opportunity for students to practice the feedback stems (both giving and receiving), and their use should also be modeled by the teacher in facilitating the conversation.

9. Prior to the next accountable and/or academic talk opportunity, quickly review the improvements as well as the talk stems.

Continue using Steps 4, 5, and 6 until students are rooted in the process.

Return to these steps at any point when students might be struggling with appropriate and helpful feedback.

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Accountable and Academic Student Talk Stems

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Students need explicit norms, processes, and models to participate in productive classroom talk

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How can we get students to use them consistently?

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How can we get students to use them consistently?

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Implementation Steps

1. To begin to design strong mathematical questions, you must begin by anticipating students' thinking, solutions, responses, and misconceptions. To do this, you should solve the problem or work the task yourself, with your students' skills and thinking in mind. Attempt to brainstorm multiple solutions, approaches, and misconceptions.

2. Use those anticipations to begin to brainstorm and design questions that will push student thinking and engage learners in discourse and exploration.

When beginning to design mathematical questions, it's important to keep the learning targets for the lesson or day in mind. For example, if the learning target for the day involves students connecting methods for solving multi-step problems, a possible questions could shift from "What is the correct way to solve this problem" to "What connections can you make between the multiple ways we solved this problem?"

3. As you begin to craft your questions, evaluate whether the questions are open or closed questioning techniques.

4. Craft your mathematical questions for the task or problem and then begin to evaluate and shift your questions from closed to open questions:

Eliminate or shift any "yes/no" or one answer questions

Shift questions that give the answer away in the question

Use mathematical verbs or open terms within your question

Examples include predict, evaluate, describe, summarize, compare, visualize, connect, what, why, how, etc

Be sure to keep questions neutral. Eliminate words like easy, hard, quick, etc. These types of words can feel like a closed question to students because they might not be accessible to all students or the question/problem might not feel "easy" to all students.

5. When preparing mathematical questions for a task or activity, design 2-3 questions from each of the four categories:

Opening Questions - these questions should help students as you a launching a lesson or activity, they should shift students' thinking towards a specific direction or topic to give them a starting point

Mathematical Thinking Questions - these questions push students' towards specific strategies, patterns, conceptual understanding, and mathematical language and vocabulary

Assessment Questions - these questions push students to explain their thinking, approaches, or how they arrived at a solution, allowing the teacher to quickly assess knowledge and understanding

Closing Questions - these questions encourage students to make conclusions, synthesize their thinking and reflect on the math they used to complete the task

6. Develop questions that promote discourse amongst groups of students. Ask questions that encourage students to elicit and use their prior knowledge and to use connections that they've made through their group discussions.

Explore the " Asking Effective Questions in the Math Classroom" article published by Ontario Education to learn more about how to ask effective questions.

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Planning Guiding Questions in the lesson can help teachers guide student discussions and understanding, as well as surface misconceptions

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What other tips do you have related to using sentence frames with students?

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What other tips do you have related to using sentence frames with students?

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8 Ways to Pose Better Questions in Math Class

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8 Ways to Pose Better Questions in Math Class

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Have you ever taught a math lesson that seemed to be going well-with students active, engaged and producing the right answers-but when you ask kids to explain the reasoning behind their work, they clam up or veer off on a tangent?It happens to the best of us, which is why it's so important to be intentional with our questioning and to think about not only the types of questions we are asking but also the pattern in which we're asking them.

Below we've rounded up eight tips to help you focus your questioning and, by doing so, deepen students' mathematical reasoning.

Don't let "information gathering" questions dominate your lesson.

These are answer-seeking questions such as "What is the formula for finding the area of a rectangle?" "When you write an equation, what does the equal sign tell you?" While these questions have their time and place (they help to establish what students know), they don't reveal higher-order thinking or reasoning.

Ask probing questions that require students to explain, elaborate or clarify their thinking.

This includes articulating the steps they took to solve a problem or complete a task. For example, "As you drew the number line, what decisions did you make so that you could represent seven-fourths on it?" "Can you show and explain more about how you used a table to find the answer?"

(Source: Minds in Bloom)

Give students adequate time to respond.

Research has shown that we often give students less than five seconds to answer a question in math class! When we move so quickly, we lose the chance to see how students are making sense of mathematics.

Ask students to make the mathematics visible.

By this we mean discussing the connections between mathematical ideas and relationships. For example, "How does that array relate to multiplication and division?" "In what ways might the normal distribution apply to this situation?"

Encourage reflection and justification.

These questions reveal deeper understanding of students' reasoning and actions, including making an argument for the validity of their work. For example, "How might you prove that 51 is the solution?" "How do you know that the sum of two odd numbers will always be even?"

(Source:@TEACHHEATH)
Avoid "funneling" the conversation.

This means landing on a desired conclusion in advance and giving little attention to student responses that veer from the desired path. You may be focused on students arriving at a particular answer, for example, or using a certain strategy to the exclusion of others. In a funneling question pattern, the focus is often on information gathering with one or two higher-order questions at the end.

Try "focusing" your questions instead.

While funneling question patterns are rigid and preset, focusing questions attend to students' needs and are open to being investigated in multiple ways. A focusing question pattern blends information gathering, probing, reflection and justification. It involves asking students what they notice and encouraging them to communicate their thoughts clearly.

This video case study shows the difference between funneling and focusing questions in action.

Encourage students to ask questions of one another.

It is much easier to facilitate a focusing question pattern when you are not the only one in the room directing conversation. Encourage students to support, challenge and question one another. For example, "Why do you think that?" "Could you have solved the problem in a different way?"

You may find that students' own questions take the conversation to a level you never imagined reaching!

(Source: Making Shift Happen)

This article is adapted from the NCTM publication Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All.

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8 Ways to Pose Better Questions in Math Class - We Are Teachers

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It's so important to be intentional and to think about not only the types of math questions we are asking but also the pattern in which we're asking them.