This past school year year, I put a strong emphasis helping my students be able to describe the processes and concepts behind each of our mathematical skills. *Sigh* And I'm not going to lie, this has been HARD! This upcoming school year, I hope to use what I have learned to strengthen this process even more. To help you do the same, I've created a list of steps for helping you get your students writing about math!
STEP 1: Create Great Questions or Prompts
As I plan for each unit, I develop a prompt to support the daily skill that we are working on. Now, I'm pretty proud of these prompts and I love how a well written prompt can allow me to see exactly what each student knows or understands about a given skill. Many of my prompts begin with the same sentence stems, such as "In your own words, explain how...", "How are ___ and ___ similar?", "Explain how knowing ___ can help you do ___.", or "Create a list of real life examples of using ___ skill."
After I spend hours creating these prompts I just tossed them to my students with little instruction on how I wanted to see them answered. I know....my mistake. :(
The above response was from one of my top math students and is slightly embarrassing. THAT is what he thought was a good response to my absolutely fabulous prompt?!?!? I can't even tell what the prompt was because his response was so short and sweet. PLUS, he used the wrong THERE! UGH! Week after week, I would write, "More detail!" or sometimes I would even say, "More detail,
please!!!" And I didn't get anything more from him and many others in my class.
I even said please.... :/
STEP 2: Create a Criteria for Written Responses
So I decided that they were truly giving me all that they could. And that although they could verbally tell me these beautiful answers in class, they simply weren't able to form a jaw dropping response independently
in writing. So I started doing a little searching; trying to find a product on TpT or an idea on Pinterest that would help my students become better 'math writers'. I was sadly disappointed when I couldn't find anything. So I had to put on my big girl panties and begin researching in a different way. Ya know.....the kind of boring stuff that they make you do in college. Gag! But I actually found several really good research articles that had great criteria and ideas for incorporating writing into mathematics understanding.
STEP 3: Guided Practice!
What I developed from this research was something EXTREMELY simple but give my students a criteria in which to follow when writing their responses. When I introduced this to the class, we wrote three responses together over the course of three days. We used this time to make sure that they were using the checklist to help develop responses that are "up to Mrs. Wilp's standards". I modeled what I expected and shared great responses from my students on the board.
STEP 4: Provide a LOT of Feedback
You'll be glad to know that "Mr. I'm-Gonna-Write-There-Both-The-Same-And-Think-That's-Ok" is improving in his Math Journal responses. After introducing the criteria for the Math Journals, this is one of his entires from October. You can tell that he restated the question or prompt, used key math vocabulary, illustrated his thinking, and made sure that his response
actually answered the prompt. The only thing that he may be lacking in my "Don't Forget to:" checklist is the fifth star: USE YOUR BEST HANDWRITING!!! After developing a criteria for written mathematical responses, I had a great way of assessing and providing feedback to my students. It was easy to say, "Great job, Amanda! You did ___, ___, and ___. Now, let's work on ___." Then, I was able to closely monitor their work on that particular need.
BONUS STEP: Take it Digital
Later in the school year, I began using KidBlog to do our daily Math Journals. If you have access to computers or iPads daily, I would highly recommend taking these prompts digital. My kids seemed to not only enjoy typing their responses more but they also provided a better quality response. Meanwhile, we were preparing for technologically enhanced testing by typing responses versus writing them! You can check out a more detailed blog post {
here}.
If you are interested in any of my math journals, click the image below to check them out.
