Student Voice Artifacts
The following artifacts are of strategies I used in my classroom to promote student voice along with the corresponding analyses.
Art. 7 is a poster of math talk hand signals that I introduced to my students to help with collaboration and discussion. Student discussions during the early stages of my student-teaching were often disorganized and lacking a flow. A student might bring up an important mathematical idea, but then, in that moment, another student might raise their hand and say something to diminish the momentum of the discussion such as "Oh, I was going to say the same thing" or "Can I go to the bathroom?" Based on student responses on exit tickets or problems following one of our class discussions, it seemed clear that the students were having trouble internalizing or retaining the ideas that were shared during the discussion. As a way to hopefully keep the momentum and cohesion during discussions, I introduced this list of math talk hand signals. They are non-verbal signals students can use to relay what they are thinking. I found that after implementing these hand signals, the number of interruptions and off-track comments were reduced, and I was better able to facilitate a clear, meaningful discussion among the students. The hand signals caught on quickly with the students, specifically the "I agree" signal. The other effect that I noticed, which I was not expecting, was that participation rates increased in students who didn't participate frequently earlier in the year.
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Art. 8 is an organizer containing sentence starters. One thing that stands out is that sections of sentence starters, like "To share/explain your ideas" and "To agree" have corresponding hand signals from the Math Talk Hand Signals Poster.
I created this organizer to help students share their ideas and have mathematical conversations with their classmates, with the hope of increasing their role in discussions and limiting my role simply to ensuring that the conversation stays on track towards the mathematical learning goals of the lesson/task. Before introducing students to this organizer, I noticed that students were able to explain their thoughts relatively well on paper, but they had trouble expressing their ideas verbally. This observation supports what research suggests:
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I emphasize student voice as an important part of the You-do We-do I-do model that I propose because:
Through my student-teaching I also became aware of how the two components tasks and student voice are connected. This is supported by the Smith and Stein quote above which mentions teachers "use and connect mathematical representations and support productive struggle". These are two features included in high-level tasks. I also noticed that the more cognitively challenging the task was, the more that students collaborated and the richer discussions were. For simple procedural tasks, getting students to collaborate and have rich discussions was challenging. There was not much for the students to talk about other than following the procedure.
As I think about my students' participation I try to consider how students' cultures, norms, and values affect their perception of their roles in the classroom. Some cultures give a high level of respect to teachers and students are expected to listen and obey the teacher, without much discourse. Being responsive to my students means being responsive to their cultures and values, so one area I struggle with is how to use this flipped model, while also honoring my students who come from cultures where the GRR model is what is valued?
- "research tells us that complex knowledge and skills are learned through interaction with others. By facilitating discussions, teachers engage in several other effective teaching practices - pose purposeful questions, elicit and use evidence of student thinking, use and connect mathematical representations, and support productive struggle" (Smith and Stein, 1).
Through my student-teaching I also became aware of how the two components tasks and student voice are connected. This is supported by the Smith and Stein quote above which mentions teachers "use and connect mathematical representations and support productive struggle". These are two features included in high-level tasks. I also noticed that the more cognitively challenging the task was, the more that students collaborated and the richer discussions were. For simple procedural tasks, getting students to collaborate and have rich discussions was challenging. There was not much for the students to talk about other than following the procedure.
As I think about my students' participation I try to consider how students' cultures, norms, and values affect their perception of their roles in the classroom. Some cultures give a high level of respect to teachers and students are expected to listen and obey the teacher, without much discourse. Being responsive to my students means being responsive to their cultures and values, so one area I struggle with is how to use this flipped model, while also honoring my students who come from cultures where the GRR model is what is valued?