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Selecting

Anticipating students’ solutions to a mathematics taskMonitoring students’ in-class work on the taskSelecting student strategies and students to share themSequencing students’ solutions purposefullyConnecting students’ approaches & the underlying math

"The goal should be to provide opportunities for students to come to recognize, informally, how numbers and operations work. Only then should formal methods, such as algorithms, be introduced, modelled, and supported."

– Focusing on the Fundamentals of Math – A Teacher’s Guide, p.4

Which student solutions might you select to present to the class?

After monitoring, the educator is able to carefully select some work for students to examine to help lead the students to the mathematical goal of the lesson. The educator selects the work that specific students will present in order to advance the goal of the lesson and promotes discussion. It is important to note that this need not only be correct work - common errors should be discussed also.

Selecting students by calling upon them as the discussion proceeds is possible. It may also be wise to while monitoring, to name the strategy as they work and let a students know in advance that you would like them to share their solution or a particular idea

In the Leaves and Caterpillars task and the table used in monitoring, it would be helpful to select students to share in order to reveal their thinking in solving by building upon strategies that support the goal of having students see the multiplicative relationship. Perhaps selecting Janine to share her Unit Rate strategy of finding out the number of leaves for one caterpillar and since her solution involved multiplication.

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