DMIC PD: Student Justification and Explaining

Today, our staff had Don and Mary come in to talk to use about our DMIC journey and what the future looks for us as a DMIC teacher.

The Journey so far...

• No longer thinking about Numeracy Stages but Curriculum Levels
• Letting go of items that were part of our old "tool kit"
• "O le tele o sulu e maua ai figota" Through collaboration the most difficult challenges can be overcome.
• Play with our groupings and think about how the children work well together and who they like working with
• Thinking of different ways to gain perspective of the class that will help to formulate groups we may not have considered otherwise
• When you are getting frustrated...stop, and have a reflection on how things have been going compared to the past 5 weeks, term or year?

Student Justification and Explaining

Using the Communication and Participating Framework:

Use this during our norms discussion...pick one for the class to focus on using. Once they have built up a bank of them, have students spend time in norm discussion going over them and what they look like just like we did with the norms.

• Require that students indicate agreement or disagreement with part of an explanation or a whole explanation
• Ask the students to provide mathematical reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with an explanation. Vary when this is required so that the students consider situations when the answer is either right or wrong.
• Ask the students to be prepared to justify sections of their solutions in response to questions
• Require that the students analyze their explanations and prepare collaborative responses.
• Structure activity which strengthens student ability to respond to challenge
• Expect that group members will support each other when explaining and justifying to a larger group
• Explicitly use wait time or think time before requiring students to respond to questions or challenge
• Require that the students prepare ways to re-explain in a different way an explanation justify it

What questions support generalising?

• Does it always work?
• How does this look compared to what we did last session?
• How does what ____ said compared to what ____ said?
• Where else could you use this?
• Does the rule stay the same when using (whole numbers, decimals, fractions)?
• Could you do this with _____?
• Can you see any patterns?