Clip 1/3: Number Talk: 5th & 6th Grade Part 1

Fran Dickinson and his students had done two previous number talks involving “guess my rule?” The difference in this day’s number talk was the graphing of the coordinate values. In his planning, Dickinson and his colleagues decided to set parameters for the learner guesses to keep all of the points in the first quadrant. They had only recently begun investigating coordinate pairs and they thought it would simplify things to have the learners focus. During the number talk, students share different opinions of how to state the rule. Dickinson and his students model “silent signals” for showing agreement and disagreement with one another’s thinking.