Case 4: Facilitating A Number Talk: Considering When, What, and How to Further Question Student Thinking

Throughout “number talks,” teachers must pose purposeful questions in alignment with National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’s [NCTM] effective mathematics teaching practices (2014). Number talks, a 5- to 15-minute classroom discussion around a computational problem or sequence of problems (Humphreys & Parker, 2015; Parrish, 2010; Parrish & Dominick, 2016) are an increasingly popular classroom routine, especially in the elementary and middle grades (Matney et al., 2020). Teachers begin a number talk by posing a problem (see Humphreys & Parker, 2015, and Parrish, 2010, for examples of problems and problem sets appropriate for a number talk) that students can solve in multiple ways using mental math. For example, the problem 26 + 27 can be solved by adding the numbers using place value (i.e., 20 + 20 and 6 + 7), by changing the problem to easier numbers such as 25 + 1 + 25 + 2 where students often add the 25s first.