Number Talks - Thank you Scholastic & YouTube!

I've been talking a lot about Number Talks with teachers. I am more and more convinced that this 5-15 minute routine is a powerful strategy for implementing the Common Core State Standards. 

Here are a few of the ways I think Number Talks are a powerful routine:

                 it focuses on 

mental math, 

a variety of computation strategies, 

justifying your thinking, 

defending an answer, 

proving an answer is incorrect, 

communicating you reasoning, 

listening to others, 

building off other's thinking & reasoning

Today, I listened to Sherry Parrish talk about Number Talks through a video posted on YouTube by Scholastic. What a great way to hear about Number Talks! 

I was reminding of all the ways that it supports the content of the Common Core - it helps students build fluency with computation. And incorporates so many of the habits of mind from the Standards for Mathematical Practice. 

Around 11 minutes into the video Dr. Parrish says:

“Until I began to make some shifts in thinking about how students learn and maybe best practices.  That I avoided writing problems horizontally. Because for the very things you're describing. I justified that if I already had it recorded vertically that they could go into that procedure and get a correct answer. Why put the confusing out there?

Now, I’m going to write just about all of my problems horizontally. I want to push on that place value piece. I want the misconceptions to come to the forefront so that we can deal with them and have conversations around it.”

I connect with this. I remember in my teaching being frustrated when we spent more days than planned on a topic and students still didn't quite get it. And, now what? More practice of the same? Move on? And then I started thinking about how I can make some shifts to my "first instruction". Setting things up nice and neat won't get me the results I want. As Dr. Parrish states, "[I] recorded [it] vertically [so] that they could go into that procedure and get a correct answer." But when we don't allow students to grapple with the misconceptions, we rob them of taking the understanding to a deeper level. The strategic thinking and the flexible thinking will help students build fluency with computation.

If you have read her article Number Talks: Building Numerical Reasoning (you can find it here), yet still not sure what this would look like in your classroom, take a moment to watch the video on YouTube. Its an just over an hour, but it is well worth your time.