The Mathematician's Chair

First it was an Author's Chair... Then it was a Scientist's Chair... Now it is a Mathematician's Chair. 

Early on in my teaching I adopted the practice of having a few students share their work at the end of writing workshop time.  I saw other teachers using a special "Author's Chair" to keep students' attention focused on the child who was reading.  It appeared to make such a difference, that I quickly decided that it would be a helpful tactic in my own classroom. 

A few years later, I realized that my students were full of terrific hypotheses and theories during our science lessons, but they were not really terrific about paying attention to what others were saying.  A stroke of inspiration hit and our "Author's Chair" became a "Scientist's Chair."  Soon students were incredibly excited to share their ideas for the priviledge of sitting in the special chair and the group was much more attentive to those ideas being shared. 

Then when our school district's state math test results weren't great, and we teachers sat around together pouring over the data, it became pretty obvious that our students needed to improve their ability to communicate mathematical thinking.  The multiple choice scores were fine, but the open-response scores were not so hot.  Lots of discussion ensued about how we might do this, but in the end the only real conclusion reached was that we all needed to give our students more practice with open-response questions. 

Of course, I didn't rush right back to my classroom and institute daily open-response math journaling as had been recommended.  Although I definitely believe open-response questions play an important role in our math classrooms, I don't believe that all math concepts are best taught in this way.  Plus, there are only so many hours in the school day, and besides, young first graders don't all have the requisite patience for lots more pencil and paper work. 

Then I went to a Math Solutions workshop and got chatting with a third grade teacher from another school who casually mentioned that they'd started asking their students to answer open-response questions orally rather than on paper in order to save time. 

Ah-ha.  Yes.  My students might not be ready to write about math daily, but they could definitely talk about math daily.  And so the Mathematician's Chair was born. 

Now I try to build in time at the end of each math lesson for the Mathematician's Chair.  Here students take turns explaining how they know a number is even or odd, describing the results of a survey, or demonstrating an addition strategy.  And just as the chair focused the audience of writers and scientists, it provides a focus for thinking about mathematical ideas.