Today, I really saw such a beautiful picture of the culture of learning in my class and marveled in the way in which my students had arguments in the best possible sense of the word. They were excited about the math, working so hard on proving their answer, and in the end ok with being wrong because they “saw where they messed up.”

I posed the the question 2 ÷ 1 on the board and asked the students to write what they thought about when solving that question, or any division equation similar to that. We shared and collected our responses…

Going back to their journals, there were some other interesting ones such as contexts and what the symbols meant…

I then asked them to write this equation and answer they thought for 2 ÷ 0.1. I was so excited to have a split class of the answers 20 and 0.2. They worked on proofs with their tables and I got some great thoughts around what the think about division as well as references to visuals they think about in their solution.

I particularly like this answer because of the way it was written…

At this point they begged for chart paper to create a poster to “show the other group why they are right.”

Each group shared their thoughts and there were a lot of “Oh”‘s and “I have a question for…”‘s going around the carpet area. At that moment, they were completely owning the class. They politely waited to ask their questions, politely disagreed with one another, and openly admitted when they “changed their mind.” I loved this moment so much, I just listened.

I had all but one student who still did not agree yet with the 20 so I had him write down why so I can think about how to structure tomorrow to meet his concerns. He is focused on adjusting either the dividend and/or divisor and then adjusting the quotient. I love all of the “how”‘s.

I asked the ones why had 20 to take a stab at a context for the problem and others who changed their mind to tell me what part was the final aha for them.

  Today was the day I wanted to have other people in there watching to be as excited as I was. I told the kiddos how proud I was of them and off to lunch they went! I then had to bottle up my excitement until I could get this all out. It was just a really great day to watch my class work, and learn, together.

-Kristin