As soon as the task had been read aloud, I paused the video for the dimensions of the container and the rise of the balls above the container and made my estimate. I was off, but not by much! I hope you enjoy this task as well.

At the 2024 NCTM Virtual Conference I had the pleasure to view on-demand sessions that gave me novel approaches to presenting and teaching. Skip Tyler (@SkipTylerMath) led a session titled "Using Reasoning Routines to Increase Student Discourse and Build Math Community. What he did was so simple in execution but so effective to his purpose.

Skip would present the audience with a set of images (no words or numbers) and prompt a question. The amount of images and the questions he prompted were foundations for building a variety of conversation skills. For example, he would post two images side-by-side and ask participants to compare/contrast. The images could be people playing sports, two photos of landscapes, etc. The purpose is to get all people talking and to find a baseline for how to communicate reasoning.

Only after conversation skills had been practiced and normalized did he extrapolate and transfer to mathematics discourse around reasoning.

I had always scaffolding academic discourse with sentence starters (which is still applicable). But Skip's scaffolding creates a conceptual understanding to expressing reasoning that I had skipped. I will be using his approach in my future sessions.

Skip is a math consultant for CTLG Consulting. For more information about his reasoning routines, click here.