Impacting Teaching Practice with Routines for Reasoning

11/13/23 • 43 min

In this episode of Room to Grow, Curtis and Joanie continue their conversation with Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta. In follow-up to our previous episode, this conversation shifts to a focus on teachers and how the Reason Routines help them to be more effective with more students.
We begin by talking about what makes teaching hard – including the fact that teachers make a million decisions every day in response to the students in the room and how they are engaging with the content; and that doesn’t even include the day-to-day challenges of interruptions, meetings, grading papers, and on and on! The routines are a support for teachers to use a structure for learning that frees them up to be responsive to the students in the moment.
As we learned in the previous episode, the routines help teachers to (a) focus on student thinking, (b) get out of the middle of learning, and (c) support students’ productive struggle. These concrete strategies engage all learners in mathematical thinking, supporting special populations from the start rather than requiring an additional set of approaches to support them. Additionally, the routines create student agency in mathematics, providing ways for students to listen to, engage with, and learn from one another.

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

Be sure to explore Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta’s website, Fostering Mathematical Practices ...
... and their books, Routines for Reasoning and Teaching for Thinking.
Explore infographics, tasks, and more for the Connecting Representations routine.
See the Connecting Representations routine in action in this classroom video.

Be sure to go back and listen to Part 1 of this conversation if you haven’t already!!

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected] . Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

Be sure to explore Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta’s website, Fostering Mathematical Practices ...
... and their books, Routines for Reasoning and Teaching for Thinking.
Explore infographics, tasks, and more for the Connecting Representations routine.
See the Connecting Representations routine in action in this classroom video.

Be sure to go back and listen to Part 1 of this conversation if you haven’t already!!

Previous Episode

Routines for Supporting Student Thinking

In this episode of Room to Grow, Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta join Curtis and Joanie to talk about how routines can provide the “opportunity and support for each and every student develop mathematical thinking and reasoning.” Although routines are used by most educators for a variety of reasons, Grace and Amy focus on “Routines for Reasoning,” which are specifically designed and structured to surface the ways that students are thinking about the mathematics and to better understanding the reasoning of their classmates to reinforce the mathematics content and thinking goals.
In this extended episode, Amy and Grace dive deeply into the “Four Rs” and “Annotation,” two of the five “Essential Strategies” that teachers employ within the routines, with an emphasis on how these strategies provide access and opportunity for all students to engage in the deep thinking of the lesson. Then, they describe the “Connecting Representations” routine in detail to help listeners understand the power of the routines in action. As Grace shares, the power of the routines and essential strategies is that they help teachers to “hand over agency to the students. Teachers are no longer are the sole authority in the classroom... it’s the students doing the heavy lifting.”

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

Be sure to explore Grace Kelemanik and Amy Lucenta’s website, Fostering Mathematical Practices ...
...and their books, Routines for Reasoning and Teaching for Thinking.
Explore infographics, tasks, and more for the Connecting Representations routine.
See the Connecting Representations routine in action in this classroom video.

Be sure to join us for part 2 of this conversation next month!

Did you enjoy this episode of Room to Grow? Please leave a review and share the episode with others. Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing [email protected]. Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy.

Next Episode

Deep Mathematical Thinking Using Math Milestones Tasks

In this episode of Room to Grow, special guests Sandra Lightman and John Staley help Joanie and Curtis understand the Math Milestones. These one-page resources include 12-14 math tasks that provide a visualization of and engagement with the math standards of each grade. The Math Milestones tasks present grade level math, not as a list of standards or learning outcomes, but as a groups of math tasks, a language understood by teachers and students.

The Math Milestones project was supported by Student Achievement Partners with Sandra and John as critical members of the team. The resources, available for free online, include a set of teacher notes that support using these tasks to better understand the math of each grade level, and to engage educators in conversations that get to the depth of the intended learning. Additional work is being done to provide “asset maps,” resources that allow educators to use student work and responses to the Math Milestones tasks to better understand and build upon students’ strengths.

We encourage you to explore the resources below, referenced in this episode:

Learn more about the Math Milestones project on their website HERE
Find the grade level grids (sets of tasks) HERE
Review the teacher notes for each grade level HERE
Explore additional resources to support teaching the standards from Student Achievement Partners

Room to Grow - a Math Podcast - Impacting Teaching Practice with Routines for Reasoning

Transcript

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;25;11

Amy

Teaching inherently is an art of continuous improvement. We're never there. It's a little mathematical to think about. We always have distance to go to get there wherever there is. And the routine allows you to like, do just the what of the routine the first time out and the second time pick an essential strategy or pick a shift and work on that shift through the routine, pick an essential strategy and work on that.

00;00;25;14 - 00;00;50;11