Why is it important?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what Math Talk is, let's look at the reasons why it's an important teaching strategy for you to use with your students.
Remember the very first question in this module? The question had to do with the best method for helping develop a deep understanding of a math concept. The correct answer was by teaching it to someone else. In many ways the basic idea behind Math Talk is that by getting students to be able to teach a math concept to someone else, they have to understand it completely. And although students won't technically be teaching you how to do the math concepts, the idea behind what it takes to be able to teach something to someone else should help you think about how Math Talk works and why we it's important for students.
Procedures and Conceptual Understanding
The goal in teaching mathematics is to go beyond simply teaching mathematical procedures. The goal is to develop conceptual understanding of the math concepts. When we simply ask students for the correct answer, we're really only concentrating on whether or not they executed the math procedure correctly. But, when we ask students to explain how they arrived at the answer, we make them think about how and why they did what they did.
Research
Research tells us that when students only know procedures, they retain less information over long periods of time and they have a hard time applying it in different contexts. However, when we develop conceptual understanding of math concepts, students retain the information and are more likely to be able to apply it in different contexts.