The phrases ‘All, some and none’ and ‘it must be, it can’t be, it could be’ may appear simple, but they are an indispensable part of my teaching practice.
According to Gaunt and Stott (2019), sentence stems like these are the ‘simplest and most effective technique for scaffolding talk’. But what exactly are they, and why should we use them to help develop high quality talk in the maths classroom?
Sentence stems scaffold pupils’ talk by supporting them to start a sentence. This enables pupils to concentrate on what to say rather than how to say it.
