Rutgers/Lucent ALLIES IN TEACHING MATHEMATICS AND TECHNOLOGY Grant
Using technology not simply to do things better, but to do better things.

Thinking About Teaching Mathematics:
Questions to Help Students
(From the Professional Teaching Standards, NCTM, 1991)


Questions to help students work together to make sense of mathematics:
  • "What do others think about what Janine said?"

  • "Do you agree? Disagree?"

  • "Does anyone have the same answer but a different way to explain it?"

  • "Would you ask the rest of the class that question?"

  • "Do you understand what they are saying?"

  • "Can you convince the rest of us that that makes sense?"


Questions to help students rely more on themselves to determine whether something is mathematically correct:
  • "Why do you think that?"

  • "Why is that true?"

  • "How did you reach that conclusion?"

  • "Does that make sense?"

  • "Can you make a model to show that?"


Questions to help students learn to reason mathematically:
  • "Does that always work?"

  • "Is that true for all cases?"

  • "Can you think of a counterexample?"

  • "How could you prove that?"

  • "What assumptions are you making?"


Questions to help students learn to conjecture, invent, and solve problems:
  • "What would happen if . . .? What if not?"

  • "Do you see a pattern?"

  • "What are some possibilities here?"

  • "Can you predict the next one? What about the last one?"

  • "How did you think about the problem?"

  • "What decision do you think he should make?"

  • "What is alike and what is different about your method of solution and hers?"


Questions to help students connect mathematics, its ideas, and its applications:
  • "How does this relate to ?"

  • "What ideas that we have learned before were useful in solving this problem?"

  • "Have we ever solved a problem like this one before?"

  • "What uses of mathematics did you find in the newspaper last night?"

  • "Can you give me an example of?"


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