“Which of the talk moves seem the most natural for you to use or see yourself using the most? Why?”
After reading about the five different types of productive talk moves to use to help facilitate a mathematics based discussion, from Classroom Discussions: Using math talk to help students learn, by Chapin and Anderson, I started to realize how natural I already do a lot of the different talk moves. At first, when I read that there were specific ways to help initiate discussion, I was a little nervous that they would be these types of talk that would be foreign to me. Luckily, however, I saw revoicing, and I was ecstatic because I already revoice everything my learners tell me. Being a child development major, I was taught to always revoice, or paraphrase, what a child says. Not only does it help a learner to “clarify his or her own reasoning, and help other students follow,” but it helps students to extend on their thinking (Chapin, O’Connor, Anderson, 2009). In child development, we learned that so often paraphrasing will show a child that you are listening and finding value in what they are saying. When you revoice what they say, they often further extend on what they were talking about because you are paying attention and you are helping them to refocus their thinking. For example, if a child says, ‘I saw a friend this weekend,” and you respond, “So you got to play with one of your friends,” the child may then respond with, “Yea, we got to go swimming in his backyard.” Thus, when I saw revoicing as one of the steps to helping facilitate a math discussion, I was excited because I feel I could possibly already be effective in one of the types of talk. I think that it is crucial to have revoicing in a mathematics discussion, especially for the individual learner. The repeating, reasoning, and adding on to thoughts are great for the actual facilitation of a discussion among peers, but the revoicing is really important for the individual learner. Revoicing shows that you care and it provides learners time to build upon their thinking. Thus, I am really excited to start implementing revoicing in my math lessons.
Mallory,
ReplyDeleteBeing that I too have an additional endorsement in child development, I can really relate to your use of paraphrasing or revoicing. It acts as a method of clarification to ensure that we fully understand what the child is trying to say to us as well as giving off the impression to the child that what they are saying is important and meaningful. It also keeps the discussion going by inviting the child to elaborate on their story, ask us questions, or talk about something else related to the conversation. Like you had said, it also facilitates other children to join in on the conversation if they would like because revoicing clarifies to them what was previously said or about the topic of conversation. By using these five talk moves within a discussion, it allows us as teachers to initiate and facilitate a conversation between groups of students and then slowly back away and let the children guide the discussion. This was a strategy I used quite often during my child development student teaching. It was extremely helpful in getting children who are uncomfortable starting a conversation with someone to participate. I will definitely be utilizing these skills throughout our teaching internship.
I totally agree with you! Revoicing seems to come naturally to me whenever I talk to young children. I notice this much more often when I am talking to a very small child who will say something incorrectly such as, "I goeded to the store" and I respond with, "You went to the store?" I have also noticed my tendency to revoice things in the classroom, especially as a way to express a student's idea to the entire class. Our class has still not done very much math, but I am interested to see if revoicing is a strategy I use in the math setting. Thinking about it, it seems strange to think that I would say something like, "wow so adding means you count up?!" after a student makes that discovery, however since I haven't done a lot with math yet I guess I don't know.
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