Effective Mathematics Teaching Practice 8: Elicit and Use Evidence of Student Thinking

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One of the most important traits of successful teachers is that they are insatiably curious about what their students know and understand. This isn’t the kind of curiosity that leads teachers to wonder, “Can my students answer 80 percent of these questions correctly?” Rather, it’s the kind of curiosity that leads teachers to look at how students are thinking, how that thinking develops over time, and how the student responds to and overcomes obstacles along the way.

Looking for these deeper levels of understanding should not be left to chance. It is the teacher’s responsibility to strategically check in with students during critical moments while they work on high-quality tasks. to plan key questions in advance that focus students on the underlying mathematics and press them to explain their understanding, and to make sense of students’ mathematical representations. A teacher needs to make sense of all this and use that to support the progress students show in their mathematical understanding. Feedback should be focused on students’ understanding of a task and the underlying mathematical ideas, and not be aimed at students’ egos by simply indicating what students have done right or wrong.

One of the ways NCTM (2014, p. 56) summarizes the practice of elicit and use evidence of student thinking is by describing a set of actions expected of teachers and students that indicate engagement in this teaching practice.