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Quality Math Talk for Grades 6–8: Building Curiosity and Risk-Taking, Not Anxiety
Thursday, October 22, 2026 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT
Quality Math Talk for Grades 6–8: Building Curiosity and Risk-Taking, Not Anxiety
Presented by Dr. Haiwen Chu, Research Director, WestEd; and Lindsey Tropf, Founder and CEO, Immersed Games
Sponsored by Immersed Games
Learn more about earning a CE certificate and our accessibility features.
Many middle schoolers go quiet in math class, not because they have nothing to say, but because math has taught them that what matters is being right and being fast. When a question has one obvious answer, there's little reason to talk, and even less reason to risk being wrong in front of peers. The result is classroom discussion that falls flat.
In this edWebinar, Dr. Haiwen Chu, Research Director at WestEd, and Lindsey Tropf, Founder and CEO of Immersed Games, explore what quality math talk looks like in grades 6–8 and how teachers can create the conditions for it. Quality talk is sustained, going deeper to explore ideas and make connections. Ideally, interactions are also reciprocal, as students build on, question, and respond to one another rather than only to the teacher. When a classroom values reasoning over speed, students have room for risk-taking, curiosity, and working through uncertainty, the very opposite of math anxiety.
The presenters share practical approaches grounded in research and classroom practice. These include open-ended prompts that invite ideas rather than single answers, routines that move from individual think time to small-group sharing to whole-class consensus, and tasks where students hold different pieces of data and need each other to make sense of it. You can see these principles in a traditional classroom and in an innovative setting: a game-based statistics curriculum that WestEd and Immersed Games are developing and studying together, where students investigate real-world scenarios and bring what they find back to the class for discussion.
Viewers can learn to:
- Describe what makes math talk sustained and reciprocal, and recognize the kinds of questions that shut discussion down
- Identify classroom conditions that lower the stakes of sharing rough-draft thinking
- Design or adapt tasks, including data investigations, that create a genuine need for students to talk
- Apply a structured discourse routine that works across content, curricula, and formats
This recorded edWebinar will be of interest to grades 6–8 math teachers, math coaches, and curriculum leaders looking for concrete ways to get students talking about math with curiosity, confidence, and openness.
About the Presenter
Dr. Haiwen Chu is a Research Director at WestEd, where he designs mathematics tasks and curriculum materials that get secondary students talking about mathematical ideas. A former New York City Public School mathematics teacher, he studies what he calls quality interactions: classroom talk that is sustained and reciprocal, where students build on and respond to one another. His work centers on how teachers can design lessons that invite every student, including English learners, to make sense of mathematics alongside their classmates. He is Co-Principal Investigator on an NSF-funded study developing mathematics tasks that engage English learners in conceptual talk, and has published in NCTM journals on designing mathematical interactions. He holds a Ph.D. in urban education from the CUNY Graduate Center and an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard.
Lindsey Tropf is Founder and CEO of Immersed Games, where she designs game-based learning grounded in authentic, real-world scenarios. Her team has spent more than a decade building and studying immersive science and math experiences and is now developing and studying a middle school statistics curriculum with WestEd through SBIR funding from the Institute of Education Sciences. Co-designed with teachers and students, the curriculum treats the game as a shared starting point for sensemaking: students investigate a problem in the game, then bring their rough-draft thinking back to classmates to discuss, question, and refine together. Her work has been funded by NSF, IES, and NIDILRR, and awarded for its equity approach by MIT Solve. She holds a master's in school psychology and is pursuing a Ph.D. in learning, literacies, and technologies at Arizona State University.
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Tyto creates game-based learning experiences that put students inside authentic, real-world problems, then bring their thinking back to the classroom for discussion. Developed by Immersed Games through more than a decade of classroom research and iteration, Tyto is built around inquiry: students investigate first, share rough-draft ideas with peers, and make sense of them together. Our work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, and we design alongside teachers and students through co-design sessions.
Today, Tyto reaches classrooms through curriculum partners, bringing immersive learning into programs schools already use. Teachers can work with us directly by joining research studies, pilots, and co-design sessions, including a current WestEd study of a game-based middle school statistics curriculum.
