“Questioning is considered a powerful tool in mediating students’ knowledge construction and conceptual understanding” (Purdum-Cassidy, Nesmith, Meyer, Cooper, 2014). It is important for the students to be able to discuss the strategy that they used and how they got the answer. (Van de Walle, Karp, & Bay-Williams, 2016). As I watched the videos for this week’s lesson, I noticed that the teachers were doing a lot of asking questions of the students to classify their work. In some of the videos the students were leading the discussions and the teacher would initiate a question to the students to clarify something that they had said. When the teacher asks the students questions it allows the students to reflect on their work and to help others that may be confused. The videos showed several different types of questioning within the classroom; probing and discussions questions. The teacher would call on certain students to come to the board and show and explain how they solved their problem. As the students discussed how they solved their problem to the class, it allowed the student to catch his/her own mistakes. It also allowed for other students to ask questions to the one presenting so that they could get a better understanding of what they were doing.

In one of my classes, I must ask the questions and lead the discussions. The reason for this is because the students in this class is very emotional and thus will not start a conversation, but if asked a question they will try to respond not in details, so you must keep asking questions for them to understand what they are doing and why they are solving the problem that a certain way. In my second class, I will pose a question to the class and then some of the students will start discussing how they could have solved a problem and what strategy they used to solve the problem. This class uses a lot of probing and discussion questions because they are my higher gifted class, so therefore they think differently about how to solve and communicate problemsolving. Smith and Stein state the “classroom discussions in which these activities occur do not materialize out of thin air. The teacher must really work hard at creating this type of learning environment for the students. For my students to be successful, I would like to use the wait time. A lot of times we are so caught up in trying to get the students to get straight to the answer that I fail to allow them time to gather their thoughts and words so that we can have a productive discussion about our lesson. For the classroom to be a productive classroom in which discussion is taking place the student must be allowed to compare one’s own reasoning with that of others. (Smith, & Stein, 2016).

Reference

Smith, M. S., & Stein, M. K. (2018). 5 Practices for orchestrating productive mathematics discussions (2nd ed.). Reston, VA: The National Council of

Teachers of Mathematics, Inc.

Van de Walle, J. A., Karp, K. S., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2016). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Fuson, K. C., & Zaritsky, R. (Producers). (2005d). Classroom structures: A second grade math community. [Video file]. USA: Fuson-Zaritsky.

Fuson, K. C., & Zaritsky, R. (Producers). (2005b). Classroom structures: Learning math talk. [Video file]. USA: Fuson-Zaritsky.

Fuson, K. C., & Zaritsky, R. (Producers). (2005c). Classroom structures: Math talk.

[ Video file]. USA: Fuson-Zaritsky.

Purdum-Cassidy, B., Nesmith, S., Meyer, R. D., & Cooper, S. (2014). What are they asking? An

analysis of the questions planned by prospective teachers when integrating literature in mathematics [Abstract]. What Are They Asking? An Analysis of the Questions Planned by Prospective Teachers When Integrating Literature in Mathematics. Retrieved November 26, 2018, from https://eds-aebscohostcom.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer ?vid=3&sid=9bf7bb48-b999-4157-a5a5-f70bbddfe820@sessionmgr4010.

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