Number talks are short, intentional, structured ways for students to talk about math thinking with their peers.  The goal of number talks is to build student’s understanding of numbers and help students become flexible with their math thinking.  It also gives students a chance to practice explaining their thinking, build fluency and gives teachers insight into student thinking. 

• Number Talks are meant to build on students’ accuracy, efficiency and flexibility with mental math and computation strategies.  

• Accuracy is the ability to come up with an accurate or correct answer.

• Efficiency is when students can choose an appropriate and practical strategy for a specific problem.

• Flexibility is the ability to easily understand number relationships in computations.

Students sharing strategies out loud is also a very valuable assessment tool for teachers.  Eavesdropping on students sharing their ideas, and in conversations with peers, allows the teacher to gain an understanding of how the student is thinking mathematically.  It is important to recognize that errors often occur because of misconceptions.

The goal of Number Talks is to build students’ abilities to make sense of mathematics and mathematical relationships.  This means we, as teachers, must be facilitators in these conversations.  We must keep the discussion focused ‘on the math’, which in turn helps students to think about how they respond and think about their ideas as well as those of their peers.