How to Engage Math Students in Discourse Using Digital Tools

During my days as a classroom teacher, I always planned my math lessons with an eye on ways to authentically engage my students in the lesson and ensure they had opportunities for meaningful discourse. When a lesson was highly engaging and featured plenty of discourse, my students consistently showed deeper and longer-lasting understanding of the math, and my classroom was a fun and inviting place to be.

I’m excited about Eureka Math²™ because it’s designed to facilitate this kind of engagement and discourse. It also makes planning and teaching so much easier. With the digital platform, the tools you need are just a few mouse clicks away. Let me share three features of the digital platform that will help you bring rich discourse and engagement to your classroom.

Presentation Slides

Each Eureka Math² lesson comes with presentation slides that you can show your class with a single click. These slides include key problems, questions, tasks, directions, and visuals to engage your students with the lesson. They support students as they talk with each other about the math, providing visual cues students can refer to during classroom conversations. As a teacher, you’ll appreciate not having to create the presentations yourself. You’ll save time and energy that you can devote to preparing and customizing your lessons instead.

Wordless Math Context Videos

The wordless videos in Eureka Math² are an important resource to promote mathematical discourse as you help students connect their learning to a real-world experience. Students can’t wait to watch and talk about these videos, which appear about three times per module. They don’t require any previous background knowledge, and the wordless format removes any language or reading barriers, so access and engagement come naturally.

After students watch a video, you can ask them to share what they notice and wonder to get the mathematical conversation going. Since there are no wrong answers to these questions, all students can participate in a risk-free way. Every student is invited to tell the story of the math problem and drive the discussion forward so that all you do is steer the conversation toward the key ideas of the day’s lesson.

Digital Interactives

A great way to engage students with mathematics is to let them try out their ideas as they explore mathematical concepts. The digital interactives in Eureka Math² do just that by making abstract concepts more concrete. As an example, the digital interactive illustrated here allows students to explore different ways to break apart the image. One student may decompose 18 into 10 and 8, another student may decompose 18 into 12 and 6, and other students may do it differently still.

Lessons like these are engaging because students have some control over the direction of the lesson, which supports meaningful mathematical discourse. Students can share how they used the interactive in similar and different ways and discuss what that means about the mathematics. With 10–20 digital interactives per grade level, Eureka Math² offers students lots of opportunities to show their creative problem-solving skills.

Grades 6–8 also include completely digital lessons that students can engage with independently or in small groups. As the teacher, you can even select and sequence digital student work to show the whole class and get math conversations going.