The real fun begins here when we ask students to say more about what they know. For example, a student might tell you, “The graph passes through the point (-1, 6).” So you can reply with, “How do you know?”
Your students think about mathematics in a variety of ways. They could use a table of values, reflect the y-intercept over the axis of symmetry, or put some other strategy to work. But we won’t know what students know unless we ask.
Asking students to ”say as much as they can” about a math concept helps us see the beauty in their thinking. When we let students lead in this way, we, too, become learners in our classroom community.
