ROUNDING UP: Supporting Multilingual Learners During Number Talks with Jana Dean & Heather Byington What might it be like to engage in a number talk as a multilingual learner? How would you communicate your ideas, and what scaffolds might support your participation? Today, we're talking with Jana Dean and Heather Byington about ways educators can support multilingual learners' engagement and participation during number talks. BIOGRAPHIES Heather Byington has taught all grade levels over the span of her 27-year career as a bilingual public educator. She currently teaches middle school mathematics and English language support classes in Lacey, Washington. She is also a student at Washington State University pursuing a PhD in Mathematics Education. Jana Dean currently serves as CEO of the Mathematics Education Collaborative and supports a fantastic team of middle school math teachers in North Thurston Public Schools. Her research focuses on the intersection of content learning and language learning. RESOURCES Number Talks and Multilingual Learners article from Mathematics Education Collaborative by Jana Dean Judit Moschkovich research Math Between Us blog "Number Talks: A Whole Class Routine for Learning Language for Learning Mathematics" article Mathematics Education Collaborative website jdean@mec-math.org Jana Dean email TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: Welcome to the podcast, Jana and Heather. I am so excited to be talking with you both today. Jana Dean: Good morning. Yeah, thanks for having us. Heather Byington: Thanks so much for having us. Mike: Absolutely. Jana, before we begin talking about the ways that teachers can support multilingual learners during number talks, I wonder if you can offer a working definition that would help educators visualize what a number talk actually looks like. Jana: Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. A number talk in terms of how we worked with the routine in this project consisted of the teacher providing some sort of visual prompt, starting either with a visual pattern of dots or a computation problem. And then the students get wait time, time to think about how they might solve that problem. And then as they share their strategies, the teacher records and asks them questions about their reasoning for why they approached the problem in the way that they approached it. The teacher creates what I like to think of as a visual mediator of student ideas. So the students' ideas become visible as they share them. So children who are listening can listen to the dialog or conversation between the person sharing and the teacher, but the ideas actually become visible as they're being shared. And the teacher always verifies with the student whether or not they've been understood. And the goal is not for the student to be right, but for the teacher and student to understand each other. Mike: That's really helpful. Heather, is there anything else you'd add to that? Heather: In terms of the way that we worked with it with multilingual learners and increasing their opportunities for engagement in the routine, we always gave them an option of talking to a partner and rehearsing their answer before they volunteered to share with the whole group. We prioritized calling on multilingual learners if they volunteered. And we also did a final reflection at the end. So those were some enhancements that we added onto the routine. Mike: I think that's really helpful and I'm excited to talk a little bit more about the details of those, Heather. One of the things that really struck me as we were preparing for this conversation was reading about the ways that some of the multilingual learners you worked with, how they described their experience during number talks. And it helped me to see the experience from their perspective and rethink some of the ways that I'd facilitated number talks in the past. And I'm wondering if you could share a bit about some of the feelings students told you that they were experiencing. Jana: Yeah. One of the things we suspected before we started was that as a language learner myself, talking about ideas that you're just forming in a language you're in the process of learning can be really intimidating. It's very challenging. So they were nervous. And when I interviewed fourth graders about their experience in number talks, even facilitated with language acquisition in mind, they talked about how much courage it took them to share their ideas. They also talked about and could very keenly remember moments when they had made a contribution that their teacher made use of or a time when they made a contribution that another student made use of later. So there was a lot of pride they felt in having shared their ideas once they found ways to do that. They also talked about how much easier it was to share our ideas than it was to share my idea. And so if, for instance, we had given them the opportunity—and like Heather said, we almost always gave them the opportunity to talk with a partner—they would often share using the pronoun "we." "This is how we thought of it." And we picked up on that and began to ask them if it was OK to attribute a group of students with a unique idea rather than an individual. And that was also consistent with many of their home cultures. It's not every culture in which individual contributions are elevated, but rather when you dare to speak, you're definitely speaking for the group, for a collective. So that collective understanding was really important. There was one child, and I'm really curious about how representative he was of many. He always talked to the same friend, and every time he shared, he, I'm going to say, nailed it. He really had it figured out what it was that he was going to say. And there was one particular day when he did a beautiful job sharing, and I asked him about that day and he said, "To be honest, that day I really didn't want to share, but I knew my teacher wanted to hear my idea, so I did anyway." And so there's that element of love and respect for their teacher that I think was also really motivating for them. Heather: Yeah. Can I add something quickly to that? So one aspect of that, I think that idea of a student sharing because it meant a lot to the teacher, we also tried to utilize individual conferring with students as much as possible and gave them opportunities to confer with us, whether it was just checking in briefly before the number talk started, encouraging them or maybe telling them, "Hey, you can share the idea with me after the number talk if that feels more comfortable to you." So it's giving them multiple opportunities to do that and encouraging them to share their thoughts. Mike: What I appreciate about what you all are doing is even in this initial part of the conversation, really getting specific about the practices and the way that those practices played out for kids. And I think as an educator, one of the things that I've come to over all my years teaching is the need to have humility and also continue to be a learner. And that sometimes really leads me to questions about intent versus impact. Heather, I wonder if you could talk about the parts of the number talk routine or facilitation practices that may have unintentionally provoked some of the anxiety that kids were experiencing. Heather: So for multilingual learners, when I think about what they will need, the supports that they may need to be able to engage in a routine like a number talk, I think about first the processing time that they might need to understand and think about different ways of solving that prompt. And then I think about their understanding of the prompt. And then the other thing I think about is their ability to communicate their thoughts and ideas with others. So naturally, if it seems like there's a lot of pressure because of time, if they don't have much time, if they feel that pressure to do that processing and think of those ideas and share them quickly, that may provoke anxiety because this, of course, is still a language that they're still developing. So that ability to share with a partner and rehearse those ideas and process that with a partner, that really becomes, as Jana mentioned, more of a team effort. And then being able to rehearse the words that they're going to use and the way they're going to convey that message and communicate it to others, that again reduces the anxiety because it's a lot less pressure to share my thoughts and ideas with one person than with a whole group. And if I share those thoughts with one person and they seem to understand what I mean, then now I might feel confident enough to share with more people. So I just think that naturally when it's a time constrained activity, that that naturally can provoke anxiety. Mike: Yeah. I mean, that absolutely makes sense. I will say as a child who was not quick, even in my first language, the impact of that was profound, let alone trying to both process in a language that I was learning and feel like I was under pressure to produce an idea and describe it. That absolutely makes sense. Jana: I want to back up a bit and quote something that you said, Heather, partway through our working together, which was that Heather had some familiarity with number talks before we started working together, but had a healthy skepticism as well. And at one point she said that she wondered if we might not actually be hurting students when we are facilitating a routine that they cannot find entry into. And so it became really like a guiding light or principle of our work together to work hard to help them find entry into the routine. And something that I didn't realize until a year after we began working together and I was really closely tracking the experiences of the multilingual learners themselves—and this is kind of back to your question about intent and impact—when we listen to childr
