Metacognition and Math Talk

Math Talk

The big buzz words in education right now are metacognition and math talk or talk moves. I have been using the math talk for about three years now and have just started using the metacognition this year. So what is it all about? Why do we care about metacognition? Why does it matter if we use talk moves in our classroom? How does math talk work?

I watched a brand new teacher last year implement these important tools in her classroom at the end of last year, and I was fascinated. Could students really spend 30 minutes on one problem in math? Wouldn't they get bored? How can you allow the students to really dig into all your math tools and decide what tools work best for them? I spent the better part of the summer digesting these questions and found some great ways to make it work for me.

Metacognition-What is this all about? It is getting kids to think about their thinking. Over at teacher karma Jen has some great ideas and a freebie to use with metacognition.  Here is the link  http://www.teacherkarma.com/2014/09/you-oughta-know-metacognition-and-freebie.html

I laminated the worksheet and place it under the document camera to write what the students are thinking as we look at a story to activate our minds for math. Once their minds were thinking about the story, the problem became easy. Now all we have to do is start working on the problem. Here is a problem I am giving the students to solve next week.

Lunchroom Tables

Ten students can fit on a lunchroom table. The table must be full before they can move to a new table. Roll a dice to find out how many students start on a table. How many more can sit at the table?

Expectations:

1. Draw a line under important information in the story.
2. Draw a picture of the strategy you used to solve the problem on the back of this page.
3. Write the answer below in a complete sentence.

Goals:

1. I can persevere in solving real-world problems and explain my thinking in words and writing.

1. _____________________________________________________________________________________

My answer is   _________________________________________________________________________.

I know this because

Pretty easy right? I give out the problem and then have the students select the math tools they want to use to solve the problem. They use anything from counters to cubes to rekenreks to counting bears. They then get a chance to work out the problem. They need to draw a picture on the back and keep working. The beauty is that most of the problems don't have just one right answer. I can ask them to solve it another way. After they spend some time working through the problem. They share with a partner. After partner sharing I ask a few students to share their work with the class. It is amazing how much thinking is going on. I rarely have to say much, because I want them to learn and the person doing the talking is doing the learning!