Shannon Beezhold

Education 302
Professor Sjoerdsma
October 13
Hintz writes about classrooms that allow for math to be an experience that encourages
students to look at their problems and to make mistakes. The classrooms in this article are ones
in which students have the language and the background to see that mistakes are OK if they are
able to learn from them afterwards. These classrooms also encourage students to talk through
their thoughts and for them to share with their classmates. The main idea Hintz is bringing to
light is that math needs to be made into a subject where students do not get hung up on getting a
problem wrong, but learn from their mistakes and work towards understanding fully the topic at
hand. She says, If only correct ideas regularly receive attention, the mathematics that gets
explored is limited, and the students whose original ideas were incorrect may hold on to incorrect
mathematics (2013). Hintz encourages a classroom where students work to move past the idea
that was incorrect and find a way, which makes conceptual sense to them, to get the correct
answer.
The purpose of this article is to exemplify a classroom where mistakes are valued because
they can lead to a student understanding the problem better. This article is written for a teacher
audience. It is an article of encouragement to teachers to show that their students can work
through problems and discuss mistakes just like the students in the examples. Hintz does not
specifically address the teachers but she gives many different examples of things that could be
done or said in a classroom to help foster this engaging environment.

This article encourages me to have the students not necessarily work together in their
table groups as much, but to work separately and then show on the document camera their
answers and explain how they arrived there. Hintz has also reminded me that a mistake is not a
failure, rather a new way to success. This will help me in my lesson to keep in mind that students
need to be encouraged for their mistakes just as much as their successes so they feel as though
they can move forward and understand better. The students simply need to say, I need to revise
my thinking and we can move forward and better understand the math.
Hintz, Allison (2013). Strengthening discussions. Teaching children mathematics, volume 20 (5),
318-324.
The mathematical concepts discovered on the Annenberg Learner in session two are data
analysis and then interpreting those results. The session begins with patterns in variation and
moves to line plots and transferring those into frequency plots. It does this move from line plots
to frequency plots using boxes of raisins and analyzing the total number of raisins in each box.
The student is to then make a line plot using that number and is instructed from then on to show
how that information can be changed into a frequency plot. This group of activities is directed
for a student audience to work through. The sessions are all-inclusive with questions and
activities. However, they may also be used as a teacher for an outline of a lesson. Because there
are no answers to some of the questions that are asked, it leads me to believe that it may be
easier to do as an activity with the class as a whole so the teacher can make sure that the students
are understanding the topic properly.
This session gives me inspiration for my own unit plan in that I forgot how valuable the
use of manipulatives in a lesson can be. I will keep in mind the raisin idea of using something in
that area to create graphs from.

"Session 2: Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability." Learning Math. Annenberg Foundation,
2013. Web. 12 October 2014.
<http://www.learner.org/courses/learningmath/data/session2/part_e/index.html>.