A NT Observation and Debrief with Ms. Brown

Last week I observed a first grade teacher, Ms. Brown, facilitate a Number Talk around seeing 6 on a ten frame. We are currently in a coaching cycle and I had asked her if Number Talks were an aspect of her math class around which we could focus our work. She was enthusiastic about this idea. I explained to her that it would be helpful if I could see a NT in her room so I could get a sense of what was happening so far. She was open to the observation. As a side note, Ms. Brown had watched me facilitate a model NT in a different first grade class a couple weeks earlier.  

It was clear that there were established routines and expectations for Ms.Brown's NTs. Students were sitting in rows facing the teacher, independently using mental math to problem solve and raising their hands. Students were using varying strategies to figure out how many dots in all, sharing their answers and explaining how they saw the dots. Students were engaged when it was their opportunity to share their thinking and were having mathematical conversations with the teacher. There was lots of opportunity for students to engage in deep mathematical thinking and ideas.

I wanted to focus our debrief session on shifting the conversation during a NT. What I noticed most in my observation was that students were mostly talking to the teacher when sharing their thinking and the teacher was always the one clarify and reiterating the ideas. Now that Ms. Brown had set up a general system and structure for her NT, I wanted her to now think about engaging students in mathematical conversations with each other and her role as a facilitator rather than a giver of information. I wanted her to think about who was doing most of the talking and why math talk is important for students. Some of my guiding questions for our debrief were:

• Would sitting in the circle change the dynamic in anyway? How?
• Are there hand signals that students use to communicate with each other? Can hand signals communicate thinking in anyway?
• Other than when a student shares an answer or the way she solved, how can we provide students other opportunities to talk during a NT?

Ms. Brown thought that sitting in a circle would probably change the dynamic but she wasn't really sure how. I also asked her why she had her students sit in a circle during morning meeting. She said that way students could interact with each other, smiled and said she would try a circle during her NT. I explained that Ms. Rodriguez, another first grade teacher, had tried a circle, didn't like it and went back to rows. I didn't want Ms. Brown to feel that she had to do NTs in one prescribed way. We also discussed using questioning as a technique to get students to be the ones who are doing the thinking and talking. Some questions that we thoughts about were:

• Who else started the problem this way? What did you do next?
• Can anyone build off that idea?
• Can anyone explain that strategy to me?
• Can anyone tell me what she said?

Lastly, we talk about tools and models that support students in explaining their strategy. Many of the girls were mentally moving dots on the ten frame so they could solve more efficiently. However girls had difficulty explaining their thinking because the dots didn't actually move. I suggested, and Ms. Brown liked the idea, that she laminate some tens frames and use Velcro dots. The other "tool" that I noticed Ms. Brown already using was naming strategies. I told her I really liked that she was doing that and but didn't actually ask her why she thought that was important. I would like to address this question at some point.