By Grace Kelemanik, Amy Lucenta, and Susan Janssen Creighton, adapted from their new book, Routines for Reasoning
Imagine a routine focused not on classroom management procedures but on ways of thinking mathematically when faced with an unfamiliar problem. Like the management routines, these “mathematical thinking routines” also have a predictable set of actions that students learn and then practice repeatedly until they are second nature.
They may involve getting started with an unfamiliar mathematics problem, or looking for relationships between two seemingly unrelated mathematical representations, or seeking regularity in a collection of computations to create a generalized equation.
The primary difference between these instructional routines and classroom management routines is that while general classroom management routines are often designed to efficiently transition from one learning opportunity to the next, instructional routines are situated in the learning opportunity itself, providing students with a predictable frame for engaging with the content. As the organization of a particular part of a lesson becomes increasingly familiar over time, both the teacher and the students know what to expect and can move fluidly in and through that part of the lesson.
Effective instructional routines provide access to mathematics in three key ways:
When people are first learning to drive, they are faced with a million small details to attend to: when and how to adjust mirrors, how to operate headlights, how to operate wipers, how to operate the radio or music, finding money for tolls at an upcoming toll booth—and all this on top of the crucial skills of steering, accelerating, braking, and paying attention to the movements of other drivers around them. As drivers become more familiar with their vehicle and the act of driving, many of these small, repeated actions become automatic and require little attention or thought, allowing drivers to focus most of their attention (we hope!) on their own movement and the movement of other drivers around them. Instructional routines serve the same function: they make more predictable the design and flow of the learning experience: “What is it that I’m supposed to be doing?” “What question will I be asked next?” or “How will things work today in the lesson?” The predictable structure lets students pay less attention to those questions and more attention to the way in which they and their classmates are thinking about a particular math task.
Research tells us about best practices for struggling learners; here are three ways effective instructional routines provide access to math for a wide range of learners:
For you as the teacher, routines keep the flow of the mathematics instruction deliberately predictable so that, as you gain familiarity with them, you can better attend to the most unpredictable elements of your mathematics instruction: how your students are making sense of the mathematics.