Number Talks with Preservice Teachers

Fall 2021


Fall is my favorite time of year. The weather is getting cooler and the trees are changing colors. Football- marching band season is upon us! None of those are the reasons why I like the fall. I love fall because it’s the first semester of the academic year. The fall semester is my favorite time because I teach math methods at my favorite HBCU, Alabama A&M University. It’s time to blog about my adventures in math methods. Teacher candidates are special to me and their mathematical thinking matters significantly. Therefore, I take copious amounts of pictures, blogs, and anecdotal notes about the happenings in the math methods class.

The most difficult part of the semester is getting them interested in thinking about mathematics in multiple ways. That is where Number Talks come in. Number Talks (NT) is a 5 to 15-minute ritual in mathematics that supports students’ procedural fluency with conceptual understanding. During NT, the teacher and students engaged in conversation around carefully crafted computational problems (Parrish and Dominic, 2016). During NT, students are engaged in mental computation which helps students develop number sense, multiple entry-points to solve problems, and learn to trust their reasoning (Humphreys and Parker, 2015). For preservice teachers (PT), learning how to teach mathematics means undoing layers of formal mathematical teaching. NT is an excellent method to undo years of misconceptions about mathematics.

  For the first few weeks, we completed NT online because of the global pandemic. I started by showing dot images via an online platform. PTs were to guess how many dots were on the screen based on a carefully crafted dot arrangement. PTs used the thumbs-up reaction emoji to indicate they know the number of dots on the screen. Instead of calling on PT to volunteer the number, they place their guess in the chat. For their, PTs were asked to justify how they saw the number of dots. PT elicited several ways to determine the number of dots. This includes using addition, skip counting, and order of operations. See figure below. PT begin to appreciate the diverse nature of finding the number of dots. One PT added, “This proves there is more than one way to approach a problem”.  



This is the start of our, Fall 2021, methods journey. My goal is to chronicle my experience with PT grappling with mathematics different from the ways they have been taught. The goal is to undo their past doing. Hopefully, PT will implement this ritual into their classrooms.


Reference

Parrish, S., & Dominick, A. (2016). Number talks: Fractions, decimals, and percentages. Sausalito, CA:

      Math Solutions.

Sun, K. L., Baldinger, E. E., & Humphreys, C. (2018). Number talks: Gateway to sense-making. 

       Mathematics teacher: 112(1). 48-54.


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