While reading about the five productive talk moves in Chaplin, one of the moves stood out more than the others to me. The talk move, revoicing, seems to be the one I would be the most comfortable using. Whenever I am in front of a class, whether I am teaching math or any other subject, I find revoicing to be very natural for me. When students tell me their thoughts or explanations, it is very natural for me to repeat what they are saying. I revoice in a way that allows the entire class to hear the particular students answer, in a way that checks my understanding of the students explanation, and in a way that allows the student to hear his/her explanation again.
As Chaplin mentions, the content of mathematics can me make it difficult for students to explain and formulate their ideas. As a future teacher, I believe it is my responsibility to facilitate math discussion by revoicing students’ ideas. Chaplin writes, “deep thinking and powerful reasoning do not always correlate with clear verbal expressions.” This sentence really hit home for me. In any learning environment, I think it can be difficult to take all of the thinking that has been going on in our heads and reproduce those thoughts/ideas orally. Revoicing, in my opinion, is a great talk move to keep all students engage and on task. In a lot of ways, I think of this move as simply reiterating what the student said. As a future teacher, I plan to use revoicing, as I have tried now, to restate what the student said as a way to keep all students in the class on track, to help clear up any misconceptions by asking questions (e.g. is this what you mean? so you are saying....?), and also giving the student who gave the answer an opportunity to hear it back. In my mind, this will give the entire community of learners in my classroom, including myself, time to clarify what has been said.
Kendall-
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that revoiceing is a strategy that comes pretty naturally to me as well. I almost feel like I sometimes use it unintentionally, because I am trying to figure out what the child is getting at as well as clarifying for the rest of the class. Now that I have had some time to think, I’ve concluded that I use this strategy a lot more than I thought (for things even as simple as “so what you’re saying is you need another sheet of paper?”). Through all of our TE classes we have spent a lot of time learning to understand that all students learn differently and that we need to make sure we are doing all that we can to make sure every single student understands. Revoiceing will definitely help with that. The only thing I am left wondering about is how exactly revoiceing encourages more math talk. It seems like, unless you revoice the student’s thoughts incorrectly, the conversation would end there. This strategy doesn’t exactly lend itself to fostering much more discussion. Perhaps this is why all of the strategies are used together in the example given in the chapter? Interesting thoughts!
Amy
I understand where Amy is confused on how to expand a mathematics discussion by using the revoicing talk move. I'm not quite sure as well. However, I think another nice way to incorporate revoicing is to have the students use it back and forth to each other. When students are reinforcing ideas or rephrasing the statements that were previously made by their peers, it's a great way for the information to be reinterpreted and maybe comprehended in a new way. That way, students who have different methods of comprehending new information (whether it is visually, mentally, etc) are capable of understanding what is being said and the student(s) who made the comment are challenged with the task of restating their ideas in a different way (meanwhile, looking at their ideas in a new light). Just something to think about...I think we all have a general feeling that revoicing has been coming more and more natural the more time we spend in the classroom. Good blogging, once again! :)
ReplyDelete-Emily
Hey Kendall
ReplyDeleteWhat I really like about your blog is that you see revoicing as a way for you too, as the teacher, to clarify what has been said by the student. I think that the trickiest thing with the revoicing is that it's just so easy to hear a student's idea that is just barely off the mark and twist his or her words into what we wanted to hear. But that way you make utilize revoicing makes it much easier to avoid this pitfall. Allowing other students to hear this discrepancy between the volunteered idea and what we are looking for will give them a chance to remold the volunteer's idea...which is much more powerful than us not acknowledging a discrepancy at all and just fixing the words ourselves.
Emily
Love your idea to shift responsibility to the students by having them revoice each other's ideas. This is an advanced step (something I don't think my kids could handle right now), but is definitely something to look forward to achieving as the year moves forward. The really great thing about this is that if students are solely responsible for hearing and understanding each others' ideas than it would indeed create more math talk in the classroom!