Sue Looney, Same but Different: Encouraging Students to Think Flexibly
ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 2
Sometimes students struggle in math because they fail to make connections. For too many students, every concept feels like its own entity without any connection to the larger network of mathematical ideas.
On the podcast today, we're talking with Dr. Sue Looney about the powerful same and different routine. We explore the ways that teachers can use this routine to help students identify connections and foster flexible reasoning.
BIOGRAPHY
Sue Looney holds a doctorate in curriculum and instruction with a specialty in mathematics from Boston University. Sue is particularly interested in our most vulnerable and underrepresented populations and supporting the teachers that, day in and day out, serve these students with compassion, enthusiasm, and kindness.
RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
Mike Wallus: Students sometimes struggle in math because they fail to make connections. For too many students, every concept feels like its own entity without any connection to the larger network of mathematical ideas.
Today we're talking with Sue Looney about a powerful routine called same but different and the ways teachers can use it to help students identify connections and foster flexible reasoning.
Well, hi, Sue. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to be talking with you today.
Sue Looney: Hi Mike. Thank you so much. I am thrilled too. I've been really looking forward to this.
Mike: Well, for listeners who don't have prior knowledge, I'm wondering if we could start by having you offer a description of the same but different routine.
Sue: Absolutely. So the same but different routine is a classroom routine that takes two images or numbers or words and puts them next to each other and asks students to describe how they are the same but different. It's based in a language learning routine but applied to the math classroom.
Mike: I think that's a great segue because what I wanted to ask is: At the broadest level—regardless of the numbers or the content or the image or images that educators select—how would you explain what [the] same but different [routine] is good for? Maybe put another way: How should a teacher think about its purpose or its value?
Sue: Great question. I think a good analogy is to imagine you're in your ELA— your English language arts—classroom and you were asked to compare and contrast two characters in a novel. So the foundations of the routine really sit there. And what it's good for is to help our brains think categorically and relationally. So, in mathematics in particular, there's a lot of overlap between concepts and we're trying to develop this relational understanding of concepts so that they sort of build and grow on one another. And when we ask ourselves that question—"How are these two things the same but different?"—it helps us put things into categories and understand that sometimes there's overlap, so there's gray space. So it helps us move from black and white thinking into this understanding of grayscale thinking.
And if I just zoom out a little bit, if I could, Mike—when we zoom out into that grayscale area, we're developing flexibility of thought, which is so important in all aspects of our lives. We need to be nimble on our feet, we need to be ready for what's coming. And it might not be black or white, it might actually be a little bit of both.
So that's the power of the routine and its roots come in exploring executive functioning and language acquisition. And so we just layer that on top of mathematics and it's pure gold.
Mike: When we were preparing for this podcast, you shared several really lovely examples of how an educator might use same but different to draw out ideas that involve things like place value, geometry, equivalent fractions, and that's just a few. So I'm wondering if you might share a few examples from different grade levels with our listeners, perhaps at some different grade levels.
Sue: Sure. So starting out, we can start with place value. It really sort of pops when we look in that topic area. So when we think about place value, we have a base ten number system, and our numbers are based on this idea that 10 of one makes one group of the next. And so, using same but different, we can help young learners make sense of that system.
So, for example, we could look at an image that shows a 10-stick. So maybe that's made out of Unifix cubes. There's one 10-stick a
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