What This Means for Instruction

Here are some tips to help educators planning instruction in communication:

• Give students daily opportunities to write, talk and reflect about mathematical thinking and ideas. Take advantage of these periods as opportunities to informally assess students' comprehension and reasoning skills.
• Invite students to engage in collaborative learning activities.
• Take advantage of the similarities between reading and mathematics when planning instruction. Many of the strategies used are similar; in both areas, students make predictions, identify cause and effect, compare and contrast and draw conclusions (Sutton & Krueger, 2002).
• Encourage students to explain their predictions, conjectures and justifications in written and oral form. Invite young children to use various forms of representations including words.
• Journals are not just for English language arts classes; encourage students to keep mathematics journals.
• Pose higher-order questions that focus on the mathematical concepts rather than the procedures.
• Promote high-quality discourse with the use of worthwhile mathematical tasks and higher-order structure-oriented (content-rich) questions.
• Have students explain what another person was thinking when he or she solved a problem. One approach might be to have students explain why and how the teacher used a specific problem-solving method (Siegler, 1995).
• Use these suggestions from the Southern Regional Education Board (2002) for engaging students in communicating about mathematics
• Organize students into pairs and have each student pick a shape that he or she describes to their partner, who tries to draw the shape by listening to the description. Have students compare the drawings with the original shapes.
• Students compare the cost of mailing a package or renting a car from various companies using rate calculators available on the Internet. Students then summarize their findings and draw a conclusion about which company would be better to use and why.