As they went about the activity, students explained their thinking to each other and built on each other’s ideas. Students may well have gotten the same answers to the questions in the workbook if they had worked independently, but the fact that they are moving through the task together focuses their attention. Students are more engaged with the subject matter making it a better learning experience.

As students talked through supporting evidence, they used vocabulary from the text (for example, acceptable, apprehended). Research suggests that learning new vocabulary successfully requires that the words be actively used. [4]

In the whole class context, only one student can speak at a time, severely limiting students’ opportunities to practice speaking the words. That opportunity is vastly increased when students talk in pairs or small groups. Students also get practice reading aloud to one another, an important activity in the elementary grades that requires listening ears—conveniently provided by the student’s partner. 

The unit will later require students to choose a position themselves and make and defend an argument for that position, but the short term goal here is to simply establish a shared understanding of what each of the characters believes. 

The students decide that “things that are annoying” is a worthwhile category, and as a result their interaction increases the nuance in their thinking. When one student says “raining” is annoying, the other disagrees. So “annoying” is in the eye of the beholder. Their interaction also leads to the observation that something that is not intrinsically annoying—waving—can be made to be annoying, happily demonstrated by one student waving the other’s hand for her (which she agrees was annoying). 

In addition to staying engaged in the task, the students are developing the kind of conditional thinking (waving can be annoying or not depending on how it is being done) and precision (snapping and waving communicate and are normal actions, but we can’t call them “speaking”) that sharpen students’ analytical skills over time. 

Notice the activity level of the boy in this pair; he would likely struggle if he had to sit quietly for very long, and may find keeping his focus challenging if he was working alone. But in interaction with his partner, he has good ideas to offer. His partner is also developing her interaction skills; she is able to assert herself at the start, letting him know that this was a shared activity, and the word strips belonged to both of them. 

Being readily able to reference the materials shows the emphasis is not on the memorization of rules, but on understanding how they apply in different situations. The conversation deepens beyond the current task as students ask their peers what they would do if the log involved exponents.

Discussion has been adopted as a norm in this mathematics class. It is a tool students use for making sense of mathematics as they explain their thinking and question the thinking of their peers. On the surface, this seems as if it is not the most group- or discussion- worthy task as they are asked to simply apply the rules of logs. The students could have found the answer and sat silently waiting for the whole class debrief to begin. However, their small group discussion furthers their understanding of the math concept at hand.