Three years ago Ron Ritchhart, from Project Zero introduced a thinking routine called Claim, Support, Question to me along with the rest of the MUS staff. He introduced it with a game called Sprouts. This simple routine has revolutionized my teaching. In a nutshell, Calm, Support, Question supports students in making conjectures or claims about anything they notices in their math lesson and guides them in proving or disproving those claims. This routine has created opportunities to make the students thinking visible and allows me as the teacher to identify misconceptions, deepen student conceptual understanding, and push student thinking far beyond the expectations of the content standards. Claim, Support, Question encourages students to behave like mathematicians and provides opportunities for students to develop the mathematical practice standards.

I presented how we use Claim, Support, Question at CMC South and CMC North with the game Werewolves in the Night. This year I have switched to using the game Poison to introduce the routine for a strategic purpose. Poison is a very simple two-person game played with 10 objects in a cup. Opponents alternate turns, taking either one or two objects out of the cup until all the objects are gone. The person who takes the last object is poisoned.

MUS has adopted a new curriculum. Like the game of Poison, on the surface many of the lessons look to be very simple. Also, like the game of Poison, when you provide opportunities for students to make claims and ask questions about things they notice, the levels of thinking, connection making, and conceptual understanding are endless. This can be true for any curriculum or lesson that is open ended and inquiry based.

With Claim, Support, Question I learned that:
• some 3rd grade students think that between 500 and 800 can only mean 650.
• some 5th graders believed it was coincident that 4.5 x 36 was equal to 45 x 3.6 even though they just got a 100% on their multiplying fractions unit test.
• some students believed that one game of Werewolves in the Night can be played for eternity.
• during a number talk, a 3rd grader claimed and supported with evidence that multiples of 6 also contain multiples of 2 and 3.
• that a math lesson can be so open ended and exciting if the teacher is willing to let it go in a strategic direction and has the math content knowledge to know where it is going.

Once teachers have invested time in teaching their students to make claims and support them with evidence, games, number talks, math lessons, and classroom discourse have never been the same.