How can you begin the conversation with your students about the importance of listening to others’ ideas? Have your students experienced someone else holding the “missing piece” and whose explanation allowed them to gain a complete understanding? Have they experienced the difference between offering help and taking over someone else’s thinking?

The Quiet Game, sometimes also called Broken Squares, was invented by Alex Bavas in 1973 and has been used ever since by teachers to help students reflect on how to learn effectively in cooperative groups. Math teacher Suzanne Alejandre blogged for NCTM about how she facilitates the Quiet Game and the reflective conversations she leads with students after they have played.

Alejandre's post includes links to the rules of the game and multiple templates for playing the game with students at different levels.

“Engaging Students in Survey Design and Data Collection,” a Mathematics Teacher article by Marla A. Sole, focuses on the context of texting while driving. In addition to being an engaging topic, this could also be a life-saving discussion. The article focuses both on designing an unbiased, informative survey question and designing a series of experiments. Students get a chance to grapple with what makes a good survey question and revise questions until they can generate useful data. Then they get a chance to consider what other data they might want to collect about texting and driving and refine an experimental process. This could be a lesson assigned over several days or returned to during the year. The data that students collect on texting and driving could also tie into other topics.