What a great day at the NCTM national conference in Indianapolis. My colleague and I arrived late last night so I missed registration. However, since my talk was today at 9:30 am, I was supposed to be registered at least two hours before I was supposed to speak, so I needed to be up pretty early to get there to register in the exhibit hall. That was not a problem since I was so excited that I was up at 5:30 anyway. After registering, I went to a presentation of orchestrating successful class discussions in the math classroom which seas geared towards elementary and middle school teachers. This was very interesting because most of what I have read has been about secondary level reaching. It was interesting to sees the framework that they used and how important it was to try to anticipate what you. Thought students would say. Many of the ideas they shared were very similar to what I would have said.

I showed up to my room about 15 minutes early and people started coming in. I was very excited that there was interest in my topic. Because this one was a research session I had not planned many interactive activities because I had so much information to share. However, I encouraged people to be a part of the conversation. I think it went very well because many people shared thoughts during the talk and also stayed afterwards. I ran out of handouts and am hoping that those people with questions will contact me and we can keep the conversation going.

I got some great input from some members of the audience that I think will really help me improve my article. One fellow graduate student told me that he thought I would have a stronger argument for the self-referencing pronoun use being a positive sign of empowerment in the discourse if I used a chi-squared test inn the data I had instead of just looking at it qualitatively. Another preservice teacher told me that I should tr to make a distinction between social norms in the use of the pronouns and sociomathematical norms. I think this is a good point and something that I need to look into more in the current research.

Overall, this first talk was a great experience and I’m so glad it was so well received by those who participated. Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as fun and we’ll get some good responses from the crowd. Thanks to everyone that attended.