You mean you want me to talk to myself?

Have you ever found yourself talking out loud as you work? Did it make you seem like you were losing your mind? Have you ever felt as if you think better when doing it out loud? Did you ever think it could be a good thing?

Thinking aloud is a great way for students to gain a higher understanding of the skills taught. But what is it? Thinking aloud is a way to get students to slow down and think about their thought processes. It helps students to understand what type of thinking is needed for a specific task.

Thinking aloud can be used in many areas of education. Specifically it can be used in math. Thinking aloud in math allows students to be engaged and walk through the problem step by step. Math think-alouds allow students to crawl into your brain and bring invisible mental processes visible. Scholastic offers several different examples of think-alouds in math. One I like to use is elapsed time. I always talk out loud when I think about how much time I have left or how much time is in a day. Scholastic also gives many examples of using math think-alouds at home, such as estimating the cost of groceries while shopping.

HotChalk, an online lesson plan page, offers a fantastic lesson plan to introduce and teach how to use math think-alouds. It can be adapted for any age although the lesson is set up for grades 6-9. One thing I found very useful is the math think-aloud prompts. It gives examples of prompts to use in order to get students to think aloud during math. Some examples of the prompts are:
· The problem says…
· What am I trying to solve?
· The important information is…
· The strategy I will use to solve this problem is…

Here is an online printable version to use with all the math think-aloud prompts.

Focus on Effectiveness has an article from a first grade teacher explaining how she incorporated math think-alouds into her classroom. She first taught them problem solving strategies in a very systematic way in order to get her students into a routine of thinking “math”. The first step is to make a picture, then act it out, make a systematic list, guess, check and revise, look for a pattern and eliminate possibilities. As they grew throughout the year, her students were taught to summarize what they were doing as they were in the process. She also had her students use the math think-aloud prompts when working through a problem. This first grade teacher shows no matter what grade you teach, math think-alouds can be effective.
In my school, we have had a huge push for think-alouds during reading. I had no idea there was think-alouds in math. I am currently working with a math interventionist to come up with activities for low math achievers to work on. I plan on using the math think-alouds not only with them but with my class.

The goal, I am finding, is create math thinkers, not just a group of bodies who can produce an answer.

They need to be asking why and how.