Highjacked Thinking

A day late and a dollar short, but here I go. I think after many years of teaching I am very sensitive to not taking over a student's thinking, but it is really hard to be consistent when there are time and testing pressures. We have our number talks in my room, but not every day because they are incredibly time consuming. So, even over the course of a year, we are lucky if all of the students had one really good opportunity to explain their thinking. Like you said Andrew, a student can take a long time to organize their thoughts and while I may have developed patience the other 23 eight year olds have not.

One strategy I like to use when they are explaining is to ask what their numbers represent. I think this draws them back into their own thinking without taking it over. They often can do all kinds of operations with a variety of numbers, but they don't grasp the bigger problem.

So I though I was good with math, but when Oscar mentioned language arts I realized where my weakness lies. I'm always trying to "improve" their writing with what I deem worthy. Its a hard line to draw between teaching a concept and letting students learn.