February 2026 Practical Practices

Enhancing Your Turn and Talk

In our Practical Practices section, we highlight strategies you can immediately incorporate into your classroom, along with resources to deepen your understanding. As the school year progresses, it’s an ideal time to reflect on how classroom conversations are shaping student thinking. Purposeful discourse doesn’t happen by accident—it is built through intentional structures that elevate reasoning and ensure every voice is heard. In this issue, we spotlight Enhancing Your Turn and Talk, a simple yet powerful routine that strengthens mathematical discourse, reinforces sense-making, and positions students as active contributors to the learning community. To strengthen mathematical discourse, shift from casual “turn and talk” to structured reasoning conversations. Pose a thinking question (not an answer-getting question), provide quiet think time, and assign roles—Explainer and Listener. This simple structure reinforces NCTM’s teaching practice of facilitating meaningful mathematical discourse while promoting a growth mindset: ideas are valued, reasoning matters, and understanding is built collaboratively—not through speed, but through sense-making.

Enhancing Your Turn and Talk

Teacher Actions

Prompting students to explain their thinking or strategy (Tell me more.)
Eliciting students to provide mathematical proof or justification for their thinking (Why do you think you should divide instead of subtract?)
Asking students to validate their mathematical accuracy (Why doesn’t it make sense?)
Revoicing students’ contributions
Prompting students to take up the ideas of their peers
Focusing attention on students’ explanations