6. Attend to precision.
How are middle school teachers helping their students attend to precision?
How can students be helped to:
- communicate precisely to others
- use clear definitions in discussion with others and in their own reasoning
- state the meaning of the symbols they choose
- careful about specifying units of measure
- calculate accurately and efficiently
- give carefully formulated explanations to each other
What are you doing to help students develop this practice? What makes it hard? What challenges are you encountering?
At the end of a lesson, we will share different solutions to problems. I will ask one student to show their work, and then ask a different student to explain what was done. It has helped my students become more organized and clear in their representations and writing so that they are clearly showing their work and the steps they took to get there.
I encourage students answer questions during class-time in anyway that they can. During the student’s response, I work to help guide the student’s vocabulary and refine their word choice to enhance communication. In addition, I have them restate using the appropriate vocabulary. I have many postings throughout the classroom that allow for easy and quick visuals for all learners. Another activity that has worked with my students, is to have them correct my errors in both calculations and word usage. It is fun to find a teacher’s mistakes. Lastly, I award “extra credit” to students who use math terms correctly (this works especially well for students who may not be strong in math, but are working to understand the terms). They will gain more “extra credit” for connecting math ideas and/or practices to other content areas.
I like the idea of math vocabulary journals. Students can use diagrams, pictures, related words, sample uses and definitions in their own words for better recall and ease in looking them up. Once math vocabulary has been discussed and written down it becomes essential to use it during math discussions as well as math writing. It is especially helpful to students for me to model using correct math language.