Capturing Teachers' Questioning of Children's Mathematical Thinking During the Circulating Phase of Classroom Lessons

• In Event: Seeing Language in the Math Classroom: Attending to Student Talk, Questions, Argumentation, and Reasoning

Abstract

We captured the variation in expertise in questioning children’s mathematical thinking by analyzing 46 teachers’ questioning during the circulating phase of classroom lessons involving fraction story problems. We focused on questioning that was responsive to children’s thinking, which involved making children’s thinking visible and responding to their thinking in ways that supported or extended their existing understandings. Three themes distinguished teachers’ questioning expertise, including the extent to which questioning gave children responsibility for sensemaking, the extent to which questioning focused on exploring children’s thinking, and the quality of questioning to explore children’s thinking in terms of customization and persistence. We illustrate the themes with rich cases of four teachers representing a continuum of questioning expertise.

Authors

• Susan B. Empson, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Victoria R. Jacobs, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Heather Lindfors-Navarro, University of Missouri - Columbia