Disciplinary Texts- Math

Synthesis

Hinchman & Sheridan Thomas

The Common Core State Standards for math have several expectations: conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and flexible application in and out of the classroom. In order to foster development of these issues, teachers must help students better understand the language of mathematics. Communication is crucial to student achievement. Students must be able to correctly use the vocabulary in respect to the concepts addressed in math. There are three registers of mathematics: linguistic, symbolic, and visual. These are interconnected and together they create meaning. Students have to be able to use all three in order to be successful. In mathematics, students must learn content specific vocabulary, as well as vocabulary that has other meanings, but has specific meaning when used for mathematics. Math has very specific grammatical patterns. These usually consist of sentences that have long noun phrases joined by being and having verbs. These can be difficult for students to makes sense of because of the terminology. This chapter followed the efforts of one teacher. She focused on using prior mathematical and linguistic knowledge to explore new concepts. Using prior knowledge allows students to feel more comfortable with the material and allows them to explore with confidence. She also models the use of mathematics language for more precise concept explanation. Modeling the use of the language fosters greater understanding and confidence. One of the more successful and interesting things she did was to invite students to connect the new concept of previously learned concepts both verbally and through writing. The pressure was taken off of the students through this more straightforward assignment. She provides feedback to develop awareness of features of the mathematics language. She builds off of the students answers and helps them to deepen their knowledge.  In addition, she treats students as mathematicians by inviting students to create mathematics texts for an external audience. This gets students invested in the concepts and encourages them to try to be as accurate as possible.

Jetton and Shannan

This text is very similar to the other chapter, but focuses on the need for collaboration between reading specialists and math teachers. Students must be explicitly taught the literacies of mathematics in meaningful ways. Students must aim toward mathematical expertise that is defined by three constructs: conceptual fluency, conceptual understanding, and mathematical processes. Teachers have three things to do to bring about a successful literacy lesson for mathematics: identifying texts to be used, identifying what reading and writing is required, and to develop a plan that makes texts explicit through students participating in processes for mathematics. In order to accomplish this, the researchers redefined texts “…to include all objects created or interpreted for the purpose of constructing, sharing, and negotiating meaning”. The vignettes showed the portions of the lesson planning and how texts work in a math class. Both teachers identified areas of the literacies that needed to be explained better in ways that developed process and content skills in a positive, exploratory way. This text addresses at the beginning of the chapter the problems of traditional outlooks of how to infuse literacy into mathematics, and presents a much better and more realistic method. In addition, towards the end of the chapter how to better collaborate with math teachers toward better success for students.

Moji

This lecture outlined the fact that students and teachers must constantly navigate between different disciplines. This often takes place physically, relationally, and metaphorically. Texts must be taught explicitly and students should be given enough background knowledge to conceptualize and explore the new material. There are several “E’s” that tie together her approach to navigating the disciplines: expose, engage, elicit and engineer, examine, and evaluate”. At the end of her presentation she adds one more: expect. We must have high expectations for our students. All students should be made aware of how to read with a specific purpose in order to problem solve and successful both with subjects and with interdisciplinary thinking.

Response

Text to Self- I really enjoyed reading about the teacher’s methods in the Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas chapter. I feel like I would have, and my current students would greatly benefit from this type of mathematics teaching. I feel like a lot of students get lost in the terminology; teaching students that some words mean different things in different contexts can be a confusing aspect of education for students.

Text to Text- I feel like this follows the course of our earlier readings. Students must be explicitly taught the vocabulary and features of the texts. Students should be encouraged to access prior knowledge in order to learn new concepts.

Text to World-Students need to be encouraged and engaged through positive and effective methods in order to be successful in math. Their success in school math class is tied to their success in the working world and influences which careers they are eligible for. For the last several years, the United States has been said to have lower scores in math and science than other countries in the developing world. I think that more explicit and thoughtful methods that focus on the unique three-pronged language of mathematics will help our students to compete on a global level.

Questions

1. How do you address the words that have multiple meanings in different disciplines?

2. How can we all work toward more exploratory classrooms like the ones shown in the vignettes?