7 Ways to Get Math Students to Show Their Thinking

For many students, correct answers often take center stage in math class, while reasoning becomes an afterthought. Even when “showing your work” gets factored into grading, kids may put in minimal effort—or, as elementary school teacher Mona Iehl writes in a recent MiddleWeb article: “they scribble something, anything, just to meet the requirement.” 

But showing mathematical reasoning is more than a formality, Iehl notes—it’s how students “make sense of the problem, communicate ideas, and prove their reasoning to allow others to learn from them.” In the professional world, mathematicians, engineers, and carpenters aren’t paid for quick answers, she adds, “they’re paid for the thinking that gets them there.” 

Getting students to value the process of problem-solving often requires a culture shift. “We need to stop treating ‘show your reasoning’ as a final step and start treating it as the heart of how we do math,” Iehl writes. This might mean challenging students to rethink long-held assumptions such as the idea that math is fast, inflexible, and all about “getting it right.” Instead, math can be exploratory work where curiosity and strategy matter just as much as correct answers. According to Iehl, it also means regularly shifting the focus from teacher explanations to foregrounding student thinking, creating a classroom culture where a wide and creative range of problem solving strategies are seen as assets. 

Here are classroom-tested strategies designed to adjust the focus from speed and correct answers to reasoning in your math classroom.

1. Ask Fewer Questions–Or Just One 

When students face a long list of problems, completing the work often takes priority and “show your work” becomes an annoying speed bump. To change the emphasis, middle school math teacher Nancy Ironside periodically reduces the number of questions on an assessment—or uses one-question quizzes—as a way for kids to “show what they know without taking up too much class time or awarding points for the sake of points.”

To make pared-down quizzes meaningful, Ironside draws from a standards-aligned problem bank, sorting tasks by difficulty so advanced students are challenged while others work with “friendlier numbers.” She scaffolds with a problem-solving framework that guides students step by step and gives multiple chances to show reasoning, often supported by peer review or retakes. The result is a classroom where students explain, defend, and revise their thinking—reorienting priorities from correct answers to a collaborative process of understanding and problem solving. 

2. Shift the Focus 

Correct answers matter, and come with real consequences—no one wants an engineer relying on faulty math, for example. “Like the finish line of a race, the answer is a goal, but the learning happens in the miles before it,” Iehl points out. 

One way to bring this mindset into the classroom is to frontload the answer, so students can focus on how they got there. “I like to get it out of the way immediately,” Iehl writes. “I might say something like, ‘The answer is 50.11 cups of water. Now, let’s talk about how we solved this problem.’” She then calls on students to explain their thinking, or has them discuss their approaches in small groups before sharing with the class—an activity that keeps the focus on reasoning and the process of arriving at an answer, rather than just the answer itself. 

3. Make Thinking Visible

At Design39Campus, a middle school in San Diego, teachers use “vertical learning” to showcase students’ reasoning—to themselves and others. Working in small groups at whiteboards or blackboards, students tackle complex, open-ended tasks inspired by researcher Peter Liljedahl’s “thinking tasks.” Each group member takes on a role—a scribe who records the group’s approach, an inquirer who pushes the group with questions, a manager to keep the team on track, and a speaker who shares the solution and problem solving process with the class. (Teachers can simplify these roles by saying “pass the marker,” and turning the work on the whiteboard into a relay so every student contributes.) 

The exercise gives teachers a window into how students tackle problems, allowing them to ask questions and offer guidance, said Kyle Asmus, an eighth-grade teacher at Design39. Just as importantly, the public nature of the work and the final share-out let students learn from their peers’ strategies and missteps. “It’s a little bit intimidating at first for kids because they’re afraid to make mistakes,” Asmus noted, but as the activity becomes more familiar, students feel more comfortable focusing less on answers. “It’s really a positive environment where mistakes are valued” and “collaboration is the norm.”

4. Harness Wrong Turns 

High school teacher Emma Chiappetta makes errors a central part of her classroom routine, noting that mistakes are often where the real learning happens—and when students show their work, those missteps become easier to spot, discuss, and learn from. 

In small groups, her students create and solve a problem incorrectly, then rotate to another group’s board to identify and correct their mistake. After a final rotation, groups explain both the error and the corrected solution to the class. The activity, Chiappetta writes, helps students view the same content from multiple perspectives—deepening understanding while normalizing mistakes as part of the problem-solving process.

For an unexpected riff on getting kids to pause and work through problems more deliberately, middle school math teacher Connell Cloyd posts four incorrectly solved problems around the room and has small groups rotate, identifying the error in the computation and writing a claim with evidence to support their reasoning. As groups rotate to each new problem, students read their peers’ arguments and either reinforce them or refute them with new evidence—similar to lawyers in a courtroom. The activity, Cloyd says, is not only fun for students, it also curbs their innate impulse to “get to the answer and be done.”

5. Tap Into Writing

To boost students’ grasp of core concepts, teachers at Concourse Village Elementary School in the Bronx treat word problems like short texts to be carefully read, annotated, and written about before solving. 

Students first read each problem closely—often more than once—then write an “I have to…” statement to clarify the task, such as “I have to find out who scored the most points in each round.” Then they identify the strategy they’ll use (“I will add,” “I will multiply”) before solving. Finally, they record the answer in a complete sentence and explain how they got there—using math vocabulary and making connections to prior concepts by highlighting patterns, comparing strategies, or suggesting alternate approaches. The writing reinforces both understanding and transfer of knowledge.  

6. Ask Better Questions

When students get stuck on challenging problems, their questions can sometimes short-circuit their thinking. Liljedahl’s research found that when students are stumped they typically ask three types of questions: “proximity questions” (because the teacher is nearby), “stop thinking questions” (like “Is this right?”), and “keep thinking questions” that help them move forward.

To keep the focus on their own reasoning, Liljedahl suggests acknowledging the first two types without answering them directly. Instead, teachers can redirect students back to their process with prompts like, “What have you done so far?” or “Where did you get that number?” Middle school teacher Crystal Frommert notes that, over time, these nudges lead to stronger “thinking questions,” such as, “We tried solving this system by substitution, but we’re getting an unreasonable solution. Can you look at our steps?” This evolution helps kids feel more confident about their own problem solving skills. 

7. Show Your Work—Face to Camera Style

Technology can make showing work more fun. Middle school math coordinator Alessandra King occasionally assigns short video projects where students pick a difficult problem, solve it, and explain their strategy on camera. Multistep problems in algebra, precalculus, or calculus work best because they require a mix of strategies and procedural fluency.

Students record with tools like Screencastify, iMovie, QuickTime, or Loom—choosing whatever they’re most comfortable with. The result, King says, is a growing library of student-created videos that not only benefit their peers and future students’ understanding, but also encourage kids to “communicate mathematically” to an authentic audience, collaborate, and make their reasoning visible in a creative way.