Helping Students Talk about Strategies

Students sometimes have difficulty sharing their thinking about strategies.  Others struggle to see similarities and differences in computation methods.  The discussions that we have with students in our classrooms are important in helping them build further understanding.  To help students see the ways in which different methods of multiplication are similar and different, I made posters for each method and posted them around the classroom.  Students were then asked to stand by the method they would use to solve the problem.  The group standing by their strategy had the task of explaining how it worked to the rest of the class.  I then asked the class to stand by a different poster - but one that they felt was most similar to the way they chose to solve the problem the first time.  Students had to explain their choice and how the two methods were similar.

Another idea for this instructional strategy would be to have students stand by a method they do not understand.  Other students in the class could act ask experts to help explain the method.  Recording student ideas on a chart would be beneficial so that students could later refer to their ideas.  The ideas that students share during the class discussion also provides the teacher with important feedback about student understanding and potential misconceptions.

The posters we used are shown below with the partial products method for multiplication, the traditional method, and methods students had invented during class.  There was also a poster for students who might have used a strategy that was not posted.  Similar posters could be made for addition strategies, subtraction strategies, division strategies, and many other mathematical concepts!

How would you use this idea?