Making Mathematical Practices Explicit in Urban Middle and High School Mathematics Classrooms

To learn mathematical practices, students need opportunities to engage in them. But simply providing such opportunities may not be sufficient to support all students. Simultaneously, explicitly teaching mathematical practices could be problematic if instruction becomes prescriptive. This study investigated how teachers might make mathematical practices explicit in classroom discourse. Analyses of 26 discussions from 3 mathematics classes revealed that teachers made mathematical practices explicit primarily after students had participated in them. I present a framework of 8 types of teacher moves that made mathematical practices explicit and argue that they did so without turning practices into prescriptions or reducing students’ opportunities to engage in them. This suggests a need to expand conceptions of explicitness to promote access to mathematical practices.