5 Ways to Improve Oracy in Maths

Mathematical talk, especially exploratory talk, is very important in helping children develop their mathematical thinking. Yet primary teachers are often more confident about encouraging oracy in other areas of the curriculum. It’s the flip-side of how productive "See-Saw Questions" with contestable answers are; in maths, where there’s so often a single correct answer, there can be a feeling that talk can be an inefficient way of getting there. But talk is powerful for both problem-solving and for “showing your working” and making your mathematical thinking explicit. These five approaches are available across a huge range of topics.

a long line of children debating with their partners

What is Oracy?

1. How did you get here?

Present some relatively simple problems that lend themselves to different mental maths solutions, then have students discuss what method they used to get to the answer. The point of using simple problems is that it’s not the answer that is in contest here, but the ways you get to it. It’s great practice for articulating mathematical thinking.

2. Same and Different

Variation theory is a very precise approach that helps children understand concepts by keeping the core concept the same and changing one aspect of the problem at a time. Discussing what was the same and what was different about carefully sequenced series of problems is a great oracy opportunity. We’ll defer to Mr Barton, possibly the only person in the education space with a greater proliferation of websites than us! His site includes some well-thought-out oracy sequences https://variationtheory.com/practice/ If you can’t find what you need there, this is sort of thing where AI does a good job - see this prompt https://chatgpt.com/share/699dfd09-b4b4-8013-aec4-db8610c2f250

a group of boys with one of them talking

3. Coaching Questions

Think about the internal monologue you have if you are trying to solve a puzzle or do a calculation at a level that is tricky for you. The rhythm of that monologue, even if you don’t always articulate every word in your head, is probably question-answer, question-answer. As relative expert, you already have a repertoire of questions to ask yourself to push your thinking along, pursue one approach, try another. Part of the purpose and power of oracy work is to create opportunities for dialogue with others that can later be the foundation for a richer internal monologue when facing similar problems. To help this process along, it’s a good idea to provide coaching questions for use in paired problem-solving talk. For example:

Can we say what this question is asking?
Can we spot anything important in the numbers?
How might we start this one together?
Can we think of more than one way?
Does this look similar to something we’ve done before?
Can we check if our answer makes sense?
What might happen if we changed one number?
Can we explain why our method works?
Do we both agree, or see it differently?
Can we show this another way, like a diagram?

You’ll notice that, like any good coaching questions, these can be used for a range of situations and they provide prompts for thinking rather than smuggling in answers. You can use this prompt to create custom questions for particular year groups and topics - just paste it in to your AI of choice, filling in the […] placeholders appropriately. It will generate ten questions from which I suggest you pick the five or six best and transfer to a powerpoint slide - overgenerate and select is usually the way to go with AI.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69cba5dd-5a70-8387-ac12-ffa57b6180bf

girl speakling to boy who is listening intently

pupils working together to decide if one card is more important than another

4. Strategic Stupidity

If you’ve ever taught instructional writing, you may have enjoyed the wicked fun of following students’ instructions to make a jam sandwich to the letter- here’s a great example: https://www.facebook.com/reel/565172732753319 You can generalise this approach into “Strategic Stupidity” - turning the tables so that the students become the experts and you become very, very dim and obtuse and only do exactly as you are told, or misunderstand everything that is not expressed in crystal clear terms. Essentially, you’re a robot that has missed out on an important bit of programming and it’s their job to fill you in.

In mathematics, this might translate to you “forgetting” a mathematical concept or process and then asking the class in pairs to explain it to one another before you follow their instructions to the letter, making any mistakes that looseness in their expression permits. Require them to be very precise, and to explain the terms they are using, in order for them to guide you to a successful outcome. This strategy works because it is a fun way of forcing precise, ordered articulation of mathematical thinking.

5. Controller and Robot

This works in a similar way to Strategic Stupidity and is best used after students are familiar with that approach so you can call back to it, “Remember when I couldn’t understand place value?" This time, in pairs, one is the robot and one is the controller. The controller gives the precise instructions to the robot who has to be instructed in every step of the process. There’s a wider oracy principle in the background here of preferring student talk to teacher talk, and paired talk to whole class talk, reserving whole class talk for pushing for depth.