Topic: Mathematics

A wrap up of the PLC series posts from 2017-18 year.

As teachers, we must cultivate the structures and beliefs in a classroom community that lay the foundation for the mathematical growth of our students. Our foundation is built on a set of nine key beliefs.

Rarely does an argument fully develop out of a few well-organized thoughts and statements. Rather, an argument is often the result of several extensions, clarifications, and elaborations of a few seed ideas.

While the formality and form of these arguments will vary across grades, all students need to be able to develop, understand, and interpret arguments appropriate to their level of expertise in mathematics.

Math is useful, but that’s not why I teach it. I don't endure the things that teachers have to endure just because I want my students to quickly calculate a 10 percent sales tax.

Teaching elementary school math can be unpredictable and challenging, but you're not alone. Here are a few tips and tricks that keep us going when the going gets tough!

The practice of building mathematical arguments, including informal justifications, is not always at the center of mathematics instruction, particularly in K–8 grades. With this book, we hope to help you incorporate argumentation into your own teaching.

Today on the Heinemann podcast: how do we create strong learning communities where students can feel confident in their mathematical abilities? In their new book Thinking Together: 9 Beliefs for Building a Mathematical Community, Rozlynn Dance and Tessa Kaplan celebrate student-centered strategies that empower students to take risks, ask questions, and grow as learners.

Once students are comfortable with the idea that mistakes are great, it is important that they begin to notice them on their own. As with self-correcting while reading, we want our students to notice when they are making a mistake and make attempts to remedy it.

To allow all learners to engage in argumentation, we as teachers need to develop our confidence in planning for the wide range of learners in our classrooms. How can argumentation be a goal and an expectation for all students?

At the beginning of the school year, one of the most important things we do as teachers is get to know our children. It is during this “get to know you” time that we can easily learn about our students’ confidence levels.

One of the most important factors in successful student-centered instruction and learning is perseverance. If we let our students give up after the first try or get overly frustrated when they make a mistake, we are doing them a great disservice.

To help build a community of mathematical growth in every classroom, we've created a set of posters based on the nine key beliefs outlined in Thinking Together.

We use mathematical notation because it strips away all the extraneous information and helps us communicate as directly as we can about mathematical ideas. We couldn’t live in a world where all quantities were represented with dots or hash marks. We need abstract representations of numbers.

In order for students to learn and understand mathematical concepts, they must live in classrooms that support cooperative learning and mathematical discourse. Students develop an understanding of mathematics when in an atmosphere where they feel safe to learn, take risks, make mistakes, and grow.

Teaching questioning skills is not an easy process. It involves patience, scaffolding, and focused instruction. Asking a question is not something that a lot of our students know how to do innately, especially at the primary level.

it’s a sad but common belief among teachers and students that math manipulatives are a crutch to be outgrown and an intervention to be used only when necessary.

I recently received this question about coaching on my website: Is it the coach's responsibility to report the teachers' flaws to the principal?