Compare, converse, correct

Pete explores the importance of encouraging students to have their own maths conversations.

It’s important to have great maths conversations because learning is a social activity.

We often tell students not to compare themselves to others, and rightly so. But, in maths at least, encouraging students to compare answers with one another provides a brilliant opportunity to deepen their understanding of a question or topic.

In the example above, I could see from the students’ responses that their thinking was along the right lines, but it was incomplete. It was clear that, together, they knew enough to figure out where they’d gone wrong, By comparing answers, they could understand how they needed to adapt their work, without me telling them.

Giving students the space to collaborate with one another and talk about maths problems is important – learning is a social activity. We tend to retain information better when it’s given or explored through dialogue. When you ask students to compare answers and find solutions together, you’re not just asking them to complete the calculation, you’re asking them to justify their workings and explain their thinking to one another. This allows them to pool their collective knowledge and reach a deeper understanding of the problem, together.

It’s also a great activity for confidence: knowing that they’ve come to the solution with their peers, rather than being told by their teacher, can really help build students’ self-esteem and reinforces that they know more than they might realise.

Pupils A and B were able to find the correct answer in the end but, more importantly – by comparing what they’d previously offered to the problem, having a conversation about it and correcting their answers – they had a deeper understanding of the problem and, consequently, the ones that followed.