Topic: In the Moment

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Jen Munson details what a math conference is, and how to make conferring with your math students even more effective.

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This week on the podcast we’re excited to play for you a preview of one of Heinemann’s newest audiobooks, In The Moment: Conferring in the Elementary Math Classroom by Jen Munson.

We confer with our students in reading and writing, but why isn’t it as common in math?

Conferring is built on learning what students are doing and how they are thinking. In the first stage of a math conference, the teachers looks, listens, and asks with the goal of building an interpretation of student thinking.

How does a conference work? What do teachers think about? What do they say? A conference is not simply a venue for students to report on their thinking. A conference is a shared opportunity for teachers and students to learn together in the moment.

Struggle is how we learn. Rich tasks provoke productive struggle, during which students actively struggle through a problem as they work to make sense of it.

Just as conferring is one part of the readers’ and writers’ workshop and could not be implemented in isolation, conferring in mathematics must take place on a broader instructional stage. But if tasks in the classroom don’t demand deep thinking, we’re left with thin conversations about answers.

Today on the Heinemann Podcast, how do we have productive conversations that help surface a student’s mathematical thinking?

In math, children are solving problems, and the journey to a solution is more valuable than the destination. Conferring in math asks, “Where are you?” and “Where could you go next?” rather than “Where should you be?” or “What would I do next?”

This wonderful book focuses upon one of the most important moments in teaching—the time when teachers and students talk together and there is an opportunity for students to learn.