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Rounding Up

Rounding Up

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Welcome to Rounding Up, the professional learning podcast brought to you by The Math Learning Center. Two things have always been true in education: Ongoing professional learning is essential, and teachers are extremely busy people. Rounding Up is a podcast designed to provide meaningful, bite-sized professional learning for busy educators and instructional leaders. I'm Mike Wallus, vice president for educator support at The Math Learning Center and host of the show. In each episode, we'll explore topics important to teachers, instructional leaders, and anyone interested in elementary mathematics education. Topics such as posing purposeful questions, effectively recording student thinking, cultivating students' math identity, and designing asset-based instruction from multilingual learners. Don't miss out! Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Each episode will also be published on the Bridges Educator Site. We hope you'll give Rounding Up a try, and that the ideas we discuss have a positive impact on your teaching and your students' learning.2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org Ciencia Matemáticas
Episodios
  • Season 4 | Episode 6 - Christy Pettis & Terry Wyberg, The Case for Choral Counting with Fractions
    Nov 20 2025
    Christy Pettis & Terry Wyberg, The Case for Choral Counting with Fractions ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 6 How can educators help students recognize similarities in the way whole numbers and fractions behave? And are there ways educators can build on students' understanding of whole numbers to support their understanding of fractions? The answer from today's guests is an emphatic yes. Today we're talking with Terry Wyberg and Christy Pettis about the ways choral counting can support students' understanding of fractions. BIOGRAPHIES Terry Wyberg is a senior lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota. His interests include teacher education and development, exploring how teachers' content knowledge is related to their teaching approaches. Christy Pettis is an assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. RESOURCES Choral Counting & Counting Collections: Transforming the PreK-5 Math Classroom by Megan L. Franke, Elham Kazemi, and Angela Chan Turrou Teacher Education by Design Number Chart app by The Math Learning Center TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Terry and Christy. I'm excited to talk with you both today. Christy Pettis: Thanks for having us. Terry Wyberg: Thank you. Mike: So, for listeners who don't have prior knowledge, I'm wondering if we could just offer them some background. I'm wondering if one of you could briefly describe the choral counting routine. So, how does it work? How would you describe the roles of the teacher and the students when they're engaging with this routine? Christy: Yeah, so I can describe it. The way that we usually would say is that it's a whole-class routine for, often done in kind of the middle grades. The teachers and the students are going to count aloud by a particular number. So maybe you're going to start at 5 and skip-count by 10s or start at 24 and skip-count by 100 or start at two-thirds and skip-count by two-thirds. So you're going to start at some number, and you're going to skip-count by some number. And the students are all saying those numbers aloud. And while the students are saying them, the teacher is writing those numbers on the board, creating essentially what looks like an array of numbers. And then at certain points along with that talk, the teacher will stop and ask students to look at the numbers and talk about things they're noticing. And they'll kind of unpack some of that. Often they'll make predictions about things. They'll come next, continue the count to see where those go. Mike: So you already pivoted to my next question, which was to ask if you could share an example of a choral count with the audience. And I'm happy to play the part of a student if you'd like me to. Christy: So I think it helps a little bit to hear what it would sound like. So let's start at 3 and skip-count by 3s. The way that I would usually tell my teachers to start this out is I like to call it the runway. So usually I would write the first three numbers. So I would write "3, 6, 9" on the board, and then I would say, "OK, so today we're going to start at 3 and we're going to skip-count by 3s. Give me a thumbs-up or give me the number 2 when you know the next two numbers in that count." So I'm just giving students a little time to kind of think about what those next two things are before we start the count together. And then when I see most people kind of have those next two numbers, then we're going to start at that 3 and we're going to skip-count together. Are you ready? Mike: I am. Christy: OK. So we're going to go 3… Mike & Christy: 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36. Christy: Keep going. Mike & Christy: 39, 42, 45, 48, 51. Christy: Let's stop there. So we would go for a while like that until we have an array of numbers on the board. In this case, I might've been recording them, like where there were five in each row. So it would be 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 would be the first row, and the second row would say 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, and so on. So we would go that far and then I would stop and I would say to the class, "OK, take a minute, let your brains take it in. Give me a number 1 when your brain notices one thing. Show me 2 if your brain notices two things, 3 if your brain notices three things." And just let students have a moment to just take it in and think about what they notice. And once we've seen them have some time, then I would say, "Turn and talk to your neighbor, and tell them some things that you notice." So they would do that. They would talk back and forth. And then I would usually warm-call someone from that and say something like, "Terry, why don't you tell me what you and Mike talked about?" So Terry, do you have something that you would notice? Terry: Yeah, I noticed that the last column goes up by 15, Christy: The last column goes up by 15. OK, so you're saying that you see this 15, 30, 45? Terry: Yes. Christy: In that last ...
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    37 m
  • Season 4 | Episode 5 - Ramsey Merritt, Improving Students' Turn & Talk Experience
    Nov 6 2025
    Ramsey Merritt, Improving Students' Turn & Talk Experience ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 5 Most educators know what a turn and talk is—but are your students excited to do them? In this episode, we put turn and talks under a microscope. We'll talk with Ramsey Merritt from the Harvard Graduate School of Education about ways to revamp and better scaffold turn and talks to ensure your students are having productive mathematical discussions. BIOGRAPHY Ramsey Merritt is a lecturer in education at Brandeis University and the director of leadership development for Reading (MA) Public Schools. He has taught and coached at every level of the U.S. school system in both public and independent schools from New York to California. Ramsey also runs an instructional leadership consulting firm, Instructional Success Partners, LLC. Prior to his career in education, he worked in a variety of roles at the New York Times. He is currently completing his doctorate in education leadership at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ramsey's book, Diving Deeper with Upper Elementary Math, will be released in spring 2026. TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Ramsey. So great to have you on. Ramsey Merritt: It is my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Mike: So turn and talk's been around for a while now, and I guess I'd call it ubiquitous at this point. When I visit classrooms, I see turn and talks happen often with quite mixed results. And I wanted to start with this question: At the broadest level, what's the promise of a turn and talk? When strategically done well, what's it good for? Ramsey: I think at the broadest level, we want students talking about their thinking and we also want them listening to other students' thinking and ideally being open to reflect, ask questions, and maybe even change their minds on their own thinking or add a new strategy to their thinking. That's at the broadest level. I think if we were to zoom in a little bit, I think turn and talks are great for idea generation. When you are entering a new concept or a new lesson or a new unit, I think they're great for comparing strategies. They're obviously great for building listening skills with the caveat that you put structures in place for them, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And building critical-thinking and questioning skills as well. I think I've also seen turn and talks broadly categorized into engagement, and it's interesting when I read that because to me I think about engagement as the teacher's responsibility and what the teacher needs to do no matter what the pedagogical tool is. So no matter whether it's a turn and talk or something else, engagement is what the teacher needs to craft and create a moment. And I think a lot of what we'll probably talk about today is about crafting moments for the turn and talk. In other words, how to engage students in a turn and talk, but not that a turn and talk is automatically engagement. Mike: I love that, and I think the language that you've used around crafting is really important. And it gets to the heart of what I was excited about in this conversation because a turn and talk is a tool, but there is an art and a craft to designing its implementation that really can make or break the tool itself. Ramsey: Yeah. If we look back a little bit as to where turn and talk came from, I sort of tried to dig into the papers on this. And what I found was that it seems as if turn and talks may have been a sort of spinoff of the think-pair-share, which has been around a little bit longer. And what's interesting in looking into this is, I think that turn and talks were originally positioned as a sort of cousin of think-pair-share that can be more spontaneous and more in the moment. And I think what has happened is we've lost the "think" part. So we've run with it, and we've said, "This is great," but we forgot that students still need time to think before they turn and talk. And so what I see a lot is, it gets to be somewhat too spontaneous, and certain students are not prepared to just jump into conversations. And we have to take a step back and sort of think about that. Mike: That really leads into my next question quite well because I have to confess that when I've attended presentations, there are points in time when I've been asked to turn and talk when I can tell you I had not a lot of interest nor a lot of clarity about what I should do. And then there were other points where I couldn't wait to start that conversation. And I think this is the craft and it's also the place where we should probably think about, "What are the pitfalls that can derail or have a turn and talk kind of lose the value that's possible?" How would you talk about that? Ramsey: Yeah, it is funny that we as adults have that reaction when people say, "Turn and talk." The three big ones that I see the most, and I should sort of say here, I've probably been in 75 to 100 buildings and triple or quadruple ...
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    28 m
  • Season 4 | Episode 4 - Pam Harris, Exploring the Power & Purpose of Number Strings
    Oct 23 2025
    Pam Harris, Exploring the Power & Purpose of Number Strings ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 4 I've struggled when I have a new strategy I want my students to consider and despite my best efforts, it just doesn't surface organically. While I didn't want to just tell my students what to do, I wasn't sure how to move forward. Then I discovered number strings. Today, we're talking with Pam Harris about the ways number strings enable teachers to introduce new strategies while maintaining opportunities for students to discover important relationships. BIOGRAPHY Pam Harris, founder and CEO of Math is Figure-out-able™, is a mom, a former high school math teacher, a university lecturer, an author, and a mathematics teacher educator. Pam believes real math is thinking mathematically, not just mimicking what a teacher does. Pam helps leaders and teachers to make the shift that supports students to learn real math. RESOURCES Young Mathematicians at Work by Catherine Fosnot and Maarten Dolk Procedural fluency in mathematics: Reasoning and decision-making, not rote application of procedures position by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Bridges number string example from Grade 5, Unit 3, Module 1, Session 1 (BES login required) Developing Mathematical Reasoning: Avoiding the Trap of Algorithms by Pamela Weber Harris and Cameron Harris Math is Figure-out-able!™ Problem Strings TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Pam. I'm really excited to talk with you today. Pam Harris: Thanks, Mike. I'm super glad to be on. Thanks for having me. Mike: Absolutely. So before we jump in, I want to offer a quick note to listeners. The routine we're going to talk about today goes by several different names in the field. Some folks, including Pam, refer to this routine as "problem strings," and other folks, including some folks at The Math Learning Center, refer to them as "number strings." For the sake of consistency, we'll use the term "strings" during our conversation today. And Pam, with that said, I'm wondering if for listeners, without prior knowledge, could you briefly describe strings? How are they designed? How are they intended to work? Pam: Yeah, if I could tell you just a little of my history. When I was a secondary math teacher and I dove into research, I got really curious: How can we do the mental actions that I was seeing my son and other people use that weren't the remote memorizing and mimicking I'd gotten used to? I ran into the work of Cathy Fosnot and Maarten Dolk, and [their book] Young Mathematicians at Work, and they had pulled from the Netherlands strings. They called them "strings." And they were a series of problems that were in a certain order. The order mattered, the relationship between the problems mattered, and maybe the most important part that I saw was I saw students thinking about the problems and using what they learned and saw and heard from their classmates in one problem, starting to let that impact their work on the next problem. And then they would see that thinking made visible and the conversation between it and then it would impact how they thought about the next problem. And as I saw those students literally learn before my eyes, I was like, "This is unbelievable!" And honestly, at the very beginning, I didn't really even parse out what was different between maybe one of Fosnot's rich tasks versus her strings versus just a conversation with students. I was just so enthralled with the learning because what I was seeing were the kind of mental actions that I was intrigued with. I was seeing them not only happen live but grow live, develop, like they were getting stronger and more sophisticated because of the series of the order the problems were in, because of that sequence of problems. That was unbelievable. And I was so excited about that that I began to dive in and get more clear on: What is a string of problems? The reason I call them "problem strings" is I'm K–12. So I will have data strings and geometry strings and—pick one—trig strings, like strings with functions in algebra. But for the purposes of this podcast, there's strings of problems with numbers in them. Mike: So I have a question, but I think I just want to make an observation first. The way you described that moment where students are taking advantage of the things that they made sense of in one problem and then the next part of the string offers them the opportunity to use that and to see a set of relationships. I vividly remember the first time I watched someone facilitate a string and feeling that same way, of this routine really offers kids an opportunity to take what they've made sense of and immediately apply it. And I think that is something that I cannot say about all the routines that I've seen, but it was really so clear. I just really resonate with that experience of, what will this do for children? Pam: Yeah, and if I can offer an additional word in there, it ...
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    44 m
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