Sentence Starters – 4 Posters to Promote Group Discussion

Okay, today I’m sharing yet another idea I stole from Ilana Horn’s Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics.  You could say I’m kinda obsessed with this book.  I’m feeling so much better at attempting group work in my classroom after reading this book.  To encourage student conversation during group work time, the author suggests that you provide students with these sentence starters.

These sentence starters are designed to get students discussing their thinking.  If a student is confused by what their group members are doing, they could say, “How did you know how to draw the diagram?”  or “Why are our diagrams different?”  I’ve always assumed that my students can’t have mathematical discussions.  They’ve failed grandly anytime I’ve tried to have one.  But, maybe my students just haven’t been taught how to have a discussion.  By posting these and referencing them, I will (hopefully!) be helping my students to take control of their own learning and benefit from the group work.

Since I like to make posters about everything, I decided to make a set of sentence starter posters.  At this rate, I’m not going to have any room in my classroom to hang up any of my old decorations!  I guess that’s a good problem to have???  One of my students (who has had me two years in a row) did tell me that I needed to get some new posters…