ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Presented by Dr. Haiwen Chu, Research Director, WestEd; and Lindsey Tropf, Founder and CEO, Immersed Games
This edWeb podcast is sponsored by Immersed Games.
The webinar recording can be accessed here.
Many middle schoolers go quiet in math class, not because they have nothing to say, but because math has taught them that what matters is being right and being fast. When a question has one obvious answer, there's little reason to talk, and even less reason to risk being wrong in front of peers. The result is classroom discussion that falls flat.
In this edWeb podcast, Dr. Haiwen Chu, Research Director at WestEd, and Lindsey Tropf, Founder and CEO of Immersed Games, explore what quality math talk looks like in grades 6–8 and how teachers can create the conditions for it. Quality talk is sustained, going deeper to explore ideas and make connections. Ideally, interactions are also reciprocal, as students build on, question, and respond to one another rather than only to the teacher. When a classroom values reasoning over speed, students have room for risk-taking, curiosity, and working through uncertainty, the very opposite of math anxiety.
The presenters share practical approaches grounded in research and classroom practice. These include open-ended prompts that invite ideas rather than single answers, routines that move from individual think time to small-group sharing to whole-class consensus, and tasks where students hold different pieces of data and need each other to make sense of it. You can see these principles in a traditional classroom and in an innovative setting: a game-based statistics curriculum that WestEd and Immersed Games are developing and studying together, where students investigate real-world scenarios and bring what they find back to the class for discussion.
Listeners can learn to:
- Describe what makes math talk sustained and reciprocal, and recognize the kinds of questions that shut discussion down
- Identify classroom conditions that lower the stakes of sharing rough-draft thinking
- Design or adapt tasks, including data investigations, that create a genuine need for students to talk
- Apply a structured discourse routine that works across content, curricula, and formats
This edWeb podcast is of interest to grades 6–8 math teachers, math coaches, and curriculum leaders looking for concrete ways to get students talking about math with curiosity, confidence, and openness.
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