Episode 82 - Hands-Down Conversations

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 82.  Today we are looking at how to have Hands-Down Conversations. How many of you were expected to raise your hand before you spoke in school?  I did.  Even my own kids do now in their classrooms.  I know this not because I’m in class with them but at the dinner table we will be having a conversation and one of them will raise their hand for a turn to speak.   When I was in the classroom, I had students raise their hands to speak because classroom conversations can get out of hand and unruly very quickly.  So I was intrigued when I saw the book Hands Down Speak Out: Listening and Talking Across Literacy and Math K-5 by Kassia Omohundro Wedekind and Christy Hermann Thompson. Go to buildmathminds.com/82 to get links mentioned in this episode and a discount code for the book.

Om Podcasten

The Build Math Minds podcast is for my fellow Recovering Traditionalists out there. If you don’t know whether or not you are a Recovering Traditionalist, here’s how I define us. We are math educators who used to teach math the traditional way. Flip lesson by lesson in the textbook, directly teaching step-by-step how to solve math problems. But now, we are working to change that to a style of teaching math that is fun and meets our students where they are at, not just teaching what comes next in the textbook. We want to encourage our students to be thinkers, problem solvers, and lovers of mathematics..we are wanting to build our students math minds and not just create calculators. If that is you, then this podcast is for you.