: Whose Turn Is It? early mathmematics

Watch a three-year-old and a practitioner at a tray of conkers. The child drops one into a pot. The adult says, ​“One.” Another goes in. ​“Two, now. How many will there be if you add one more?” The child pauses, hand hovering, and says, ​“Three.” Not a lesson. A rally. A ball going back and forth, and with every return the child is asked to do a little more than she could do alone.

That rally, it turns out, may be the most mathematically important thing happening in the room.

We tend to measure early language by volume. Count the words a child hears, the argument goes, and you can predict the gap that opens later. But evidence now suggests that it’s not the number of words washing over a child. It is the number of conversational turns, the back-and-forth exchanges between child and adult. More striking still, the effect holds regardless of family income or parental education. The turn-taking does the work, not the wealth (Romeo et al., 2018).

This matters enormously for how we read the EEF’s guidance on early mathematics. Recommendation 2 asks settings to dedicate time for children to learn mathematics and to weave it through the day, reinforcing mathematical vocabulary and creating opportunities for extended discussion of mathematical ideas with individuals and small groups of children (EEF, 2020). Read alongside Romeo, that recommendation stops being a call for more maths talk in the abstract. It becomes a call for more turns. The mathematical concept lives in the exchange. ​“How do you know?” ​“What if we had one fewer?” ​“Show me a different way.” Each question is an invitation to return the ball, and each return stretches the thinking a fraction further than the child could reach alone.

Here is the difficulty, and it is the part we say least about. Turns may not be distributed evenly. Spend a morning tallying which children engage in sustained back-and-forth with an adult, and a pattern may emerge that might trouble us. The children who already talk readily, who catch an adult’s eye and hold it, who offer the confident answer, draw the rallies towards themselves. The quieter child, the one still finding her feet in the language of the setting, watches the game from the side. Research on classroom discussion suggests that participation concentrates among a confident minority, and those that that are linguistically vulnerable may receive less attention from the practitioner. The mechanism that matters most may be quietly missing from the children who would gain most from it.

This is not a story about effort. Practitioners are not withholding attention. Attention is finite, a setting is busy, and a child who returns the ball makes the next turn easy to give. The pull is structural, not moral. Which is precisely why it has to be planned against rather than felt around.

So, the question for a setting is not ​“are we talking enough about maths?” It is sharper and more uncomfortable. Whose turn is it? Who in this room has not been into a real mathematical rally this week, and what would it take to seek them out tomorrow? A practitioner who decides, deliberately, to spend three minutes counting shells with the child who never volunteers is not being kind. She is redirecting the single most powerful variable we have towards the child the data says is missing out on it.

The task is to keep returning the ball, and to make sure the ball reaches the child standing quietly at the edge of the tray.

Further Reading

Romeo et al. (2018), Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap, Psychological Science (https://journals.sagepub.com/d…); MIT News summary (https://news.mit.edu/2018/conv…)

EEF, Improving Mathematics in the Early Years and Key Stage 1 (Recommendation 2) (https://educationendowmentfoun…)

REPEY / Sustained Shared Thinking (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002; EPPE)
(https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/case…y‑years)

Differential participation in whole-class discussions and marginalised identities (https://ojs.unisa.edu.au/index…)