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Step 3: Teacher Support
Step 3: Teacher Support
Shaping Student Talk Through Intentional Teacher Moves
The way you interact with small groups can either open up space for student-to-student dialogue—or unintentionally shut it down.
In Step 3, you’ll reflect on your role in facilitating discourse and learn how your support can either promote or limit peer-to-peer interaction. One important goal of small-group facilitation is to encourage students to engage directly with one another as they reason through mathematical ideas.
Use the Teacher Support tool to help you recognize two types of teacher talk:
Product Help*, which focuses on content and often results in one-on-one teacher-student talk
Process Help*, which encourages students to explain, question, and respond to each other
How do you interact with small groups?
Product Help
Product Help
Your questions or prompts focus on the mathematics content.
Process Help
Process Help
Your questions or prompts focus on helping students communicate with one another about the mathematics.
Tips for Differentiating Product Help and Process Help
What happens when you provide Product Help?
What happens when you provide Product Help?
❎ Product Help results in Teacher-Student-Teacher-Student conversation pattern.
❎ Typically one student is participating in a conversation with the teacher.
❎ The teacher is doing the majority of the talking and thinking.
What happens when you provide Process Help?
What happens when you provide Process Help?
✅ Process Help results in Teacher-Student-Student-Student conversation pattern.
✅ Typically all students are participating in a conversation with each other.
✅ The students are doing the majority of the talking and thinking.
*Note: Product Help and Process Help are from the work of Dekker, R., & Elshout-Mohr, M. (2004). Teacher interventions aimed at mathematical level raising during collaborative learning. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 56, 39-65.
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