Why Write in Math Class?

by Linda Dacey, Rebeka Eston Salemi, Kathleen OConnell Hopping

To help students communicate their mathematical thinking, many teachers have created classrooms where math talk has become a successful and joyful instructional practice. Building on that success, the ideas in Why Write in Math Class? help students construct, explore, represent, refine, connect, and reflect on mathematical ideas. Writing also provides teachers with a window into each student's thinking and informs instructional decisions.Focusing on five types of writing in math (exploratory, explanatory, argumentative, creative, and reflective), Why Write in Math Class? offers a variety of ways to integrate writing into the math class. The ideas in this book will help you make connections to what you already know about the teaching of writing within literacy instruction and build on what you've learned about the development of classroom communities that support math talk.The authors offer practical advice about how to support writing in math, as well as many specific examples of writing prompts and tasks that require high-cognitive demand. Extensive stories and samples of student work from K-5 classrooms give a vision of how writing in math class can successfully unfold.

174 pages, Paperback

Published April 13, 2018

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, and the authors do a good job of laying out the whys and hows of writing in the classroom. The book starts with looking at what writing can be in a math class (it doesn't just have to be formal writing to count) and each following chapter looks at a different type of writing: exploration, describing and explanation, justification and convincing, connecting math and creativity, and reflection. The best part of this book is the wide range of student samples in each chapter. There are lots of different ideas for getting students to write in my class, and every suggestion comes with at least, and usually more, examples of real students' writing, from kindergarten all the way up to fifth grade. There are also helpful teacher reflections to show what doing this in the classroom really looks like. It didn't have a lot of new information for me as a veteran teacher, but I could see this being really valuable for new teachers or teachers looking to bring writing into their math classes on a regular basis.