Why You Should Ask Kids What They See and Hear in Their Head When Solving Problems
Last Tuesday, my daughter Priya was stuck on a subtraction problem. She had her pencil pressed to the paper, her eraser was worn down to a nub, and she’d rewritten the same problem three times. I did what I usually do, which is to lean over her shoulder and say something helpful like, “Remember, you can’t take eight from two, so you need to borrow.”
She nodded. She wrote nothing.
I tried again, slower, with more pointing. Still nothing. Then, mostly out of frustration, I asked a different question. “What are you seeing in your head right now?”
She looked up. “An empty box.”
“An empty box?”
“Where the two is. When you borrow, the two is supposed to turn into something, and I keep looking for the number that goes there, but I can’t see it. It’s just an empty box.”
She’d been stuck for ten minutes, not because she didn’t understand borrowing, but because she was picturing it wrong. She was watching the numbers move around in her mind, and the zero in the tens place had become a hole she couldn’t climb out of.
That was the day I stopped asking kids what they were thinking and started asking what they were seeing.
Since then, I’ve used some version of that question with my own kids, with students in my classroom, and with my nephew, who once spent an entire homework session describing the way the numbers on his worksheet looked like they were “sliding downhill.” His answers were strange, but they explained a lot. He wasn’t confused about addition. He was confused about the picture he had made of it.
When you ask a child what’s going on inside their head, you usually get one of two things: “I don’t know” or something specific and useful. The trick is getting past the first one. “What are you thinking?” is too broad. Kids learn early that this question usually means “you’re taking too long,” so they answer with whatever gets them off the hook.
But “What do you see in your head?” is strange enough that it catches them off guard. They actually look. And once they’re looking, you can ask follow-up questions. Do you see a picture? Numbers? Words? Is there a voice talking to you? What is it saying? If you had to draw what you’re seeing, what would it look like?
Some kids answer with images. A boy named Sam, when he read a word problem about a girl with three apples who gave two away, saw a small movie: the apples lined up on a table, then two of them disappearing as he read. That sounded fine until I asked what happened to the number three. He said, “What number three?” He’d been watching the story like a cartoon and had lost track of the quantities entirely. He wasn’t ignoring the math; he was narrating it.
Other kids hear a voice. One girl told me hers was “a checker,” a quiet voice that repeated her answers back to her so she could decide if they sounded
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