Case 9: When the Right Answer Is Not Enough

Anyone who teaches mathematics has seen student work where the student has the correct answer, but their process of solving the task is difficult to understand. These student responses often reflect the individual’s inability to not yet clearly articulate why they got the answer they did. Their solutions may also not yet include meaningful mathematical understanding. Sometimes, these occurrences are the result of a passive robotic approach to solving mathematics problems (Van de Walle et al., 2013). This case study focuses on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2014) Effective Teaching Practice of Facilitating Meaningful Discourse through the lens of a project conducted in a Northeast Ohio County School system. The aim was to help teachers support students’ notation of their problem-solving processes. The project was part of a professional learning series to implement mathematical discourse tasks that promoted reasoning and problem-solving. These professional learning opportunities provided activities that teachers could use in their classrooms to promote discourse, development of rubrics to assess the students’ discourse, as well as observations of the teachers to provide feedback on their implementation of the activities.