TCM February Article - Techniques for Small Group Discourse

The following article, found in the February 2010 issue of the "Teaching Children Mathematics" journal, entitled "Techniques for Small Group Discourse" was written by a culmination of authors including, Hulya Kilic, Dionne I. Cross, Filyet A. Ersoz, Denise S. Mewborn, Diana Swanagan and Jisun Kim. The article focused on the following three general areas, communication, reasoning, and teaching. Specifically it discussed the various types of instructional facilitation that you as a teacher can use to positively influence your students' thinking. The article stressed the idea of small group participation and roles that can positively influence students peer interactions, along with their overall levels of participation and learning. Moving beyond the students benefits, the article discussed the positive aspects of small group communication for teachers. The article stressed the idea that participating in small groups as a teacher can help teachers to reflect on their own practices, discuss with their peers and co-workers and reflect on what is working inside and outside of the classroom and what is not. By participating in this type of group reflection, educators can further determine their role as teacher and the effect they are having on their students education, along with increasing their overall level of competence in the area that they are teaching.
Overall I have to say that I found this particular article to be very insightful and helpful. While the basic ideas behind it were not foreign to me, and were closely interwoven with the personal ideas that I hold on the issue of small-group collaboration, it was refreshing to read a professional article such as this reiterating and confirming my own ideas. One area that this article discussed that I had never really thought of before was that of the benefits for teachers. While in hindsight those benefits seem obvious, I had personally never gone as far as to think of the benefits of peer small group collaboration for teachers and had always left it inside the classroom for the students. By reading about the benefits for teachers, and exploring the higher levels of effectiveness it can help you achieve as an educator, I can confidently say that positive and effective small-group collaboration will not only be a goal of mine inside the classroom, but also outside of it with my fellow educators.