Image of the Week: Anticipating Student Thinking – Asking How Many? with Coins

Anticipating Student Thinking: Asking How Many? with Coins

Here at multiplicity lab, we’re launching a new video series designed to help you prepare to facilitate Look-Think-Talk activities with your students. One of the best ways to prepare for mathematical conversations with our students is by anticipating students’ thinking. When we try to imagine what our students might say, we prime ourselves to better hear, understand, and respond to their ideas. It also helps us open up to diverse ways of seeing and problem-solving. We can never anticipate everything that children might say, but by practicing anticipating students’ thinking we can better embrace the multiplicity of approaches students might take and see the possible mathematical connections between students’ ideas.

 In the Anticipating Student Thinking series, we’ll share a video of a single activity each month that includes some of the ways that students might interpret, think about, and solve the task. In just 3 – 5 minutes, you could be ready to launch a juicy mathematical conversation with your students.

Give it a try! This week we explore how students might think about the question How many? with the image of coins shown above.

And we invite you to follow us on Twitter! Tweet us the fascinating ideas you students have about our activities or how you’re trying these activities in your space. We can’t wait to hear from you!

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group