The Math Pact High School

A school-wide solution for students’ mathematics success! Do you sometimes start to teach a mathematics concept and feel like you’re staring at a sea of bewildered faces? What happens when you discover students previously learned a calculation trick or a mnemonic that has muddied their long-term understanding? When "rules" seem to change from year to year, teacher to teacher, or school to school, mathematics can seem like a disconnected mystery for students. Clear up the confusion with a Mathematics Whole-School Agreement! Expanded from the highly popular "Rules that Expire" series of NCTM articles, this essential guide leads educators through the collaborative step-by-step process of establishing a coherent and consistent learner-centered and equitable approach to mathematics instruction. Through this work, you will identify, streamline, and become passionate about using clear and consistent mathematical language, notations, representations, rules, and generalizations within and across classrooms and grades. Importantly, you’ll learn to avoid "rules that expire"—tricks that may seem to help students in one grade but hurt in the long run. Features of this book include · Abundant grade-specific examples · Effective working plans for sustainability · Barrier-busting tips, to-dos, and try-it-outs · Practical templates and checklists · PLC prompts and discussion points When teachers unite across grades, students hit the ground running every year. Take the next step together as a team and help all your students build on existing understanding to find new success and most importantly, love learning and doing mathematics!

A schoolwide solution for mathematics success! When "rules" seem to change from year to year, mathematics can seem like a disconnected mystery for students. Clear up the confusion with a Mathematics Whole-School Agreement! Expanded from the highly popular "Rules that Expire" series of NCTM articles, this essential guide leads educators through the collaborative step-by-step process of establishing a coherent and consistent learner-centered and equitable approach to mathematics instruction. You’ll learn to avoid "rules that expire"—tricks that may seem to help students in one grade but hurt in the long run. Features include · Abundant grade-specific examples · Effective working plans for sustainability · Barrier-busting tips, to-dos, and try-it-outs · PLC prompts and discussion points

A schoolwide solution for students’ mathematics success! Do you sometimes start to teach a mathematics concept and feel like you’re staring at a sea of bewildered faces? What happens when you discover students previously learned a calculation trick or a mnemonic that has muddied their long-term understanding? When "rules" seem to change from year to year, teacher to teacher, or school to school, mathematics can seem like a disconnected mystery for students. Clear up the confusion with a Mathematics Whole-School Agreement! Expanded from the highly popular "Rules that Expire" series of NCTM articles, this essential guide leads educators through the collaborative step-by-step process of establishing a coherent and consistent learner-centered and equitable approach to mathematics instruction. Through this work, you will identify, streamline, and become passionate about using clear and consistent mathematical language, notations, representations, rules, and generalizations within and across classrooms and grades. Importantly, you’ll learn to avoid "rules that expire"—tricks that may seem to help students in one grade but hurt in the long run. Features of this book include · Abundant grade-specific examples · Effective working plans for sustainability · Barrier-busting tips, to-dos, and try-it-outs · Practical templates and checklists · PLC prompts and discussion points When teachers unite across grades, students hit the ground running every year. Take the next step together as a team and help all your students build on existing understanding to find new success and most importantly, love learning and doing mathematics!

A thinking student is an engaged student Teachers often find it difficult to implement lessons that help students go beyond rote memorization and repetitive calculations. In fact, institutional norms and habits that permeate all classrooms can actually be enabling "non-thinking" student behavior. Sparked by observing teachers struggle to implement rich mathematics tasks to engage students in deep thinking, Peter Liljedahl has translated his 15 years of research into this practical guide on how to move toward a thinking classroom. Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K–12 helps teachers implement 14 optimal practices for thinking that create an ideal setting for deep mathematics learning to occur. This guide Provides the what, why, and how of each practice and answers teachers’ most frequently asked questions Includes firsthand accounts of how these practices foster thinking through teacher and student interviews and student work samples Offers a plethora of macro moves, micro moves, and rich tasks to get started Organizes the 14 practices into four toolkits that can be implemented in order and built on throughout the year When combined, these unique research-based practices create the optimal conditions for learner-centered, student-owned deep mathematical thinking and learning, and have the power to transform mathematics classrooms like never before.

Being an effective math educator is one part based on the quality of the tasks we give, one part how we diagnose what we see, and one part what we do with what we find. Yet with so many students and big concepts to cover, it can be hard to slow down enough to look for those moments when students’ responses tell us what we need to know about next best steps. In this remarkable book, John SanGiovanni helps us value our young learners’ misconceptions and incomplete understandings as much as their correct ones—because it’s the gap in their understanding today that holds the secrets to planning tomorrow’s best teaching. SanGiovanni lays out 160 high-quality tasks aligned to the standards and big ideas of grades K-2 mathematics, including counting and representing numbers, number relationships and comparison, addition and subtraction within 100 and 1000, money and time, and multiplication and division. The tasks are all downloadable so you can use or modify them for instruction and assessment. Each big idea offers a starting task followed by: what makes it a high-quality taskwhat you might anticipate before students work with the task 4 student examples of the completed task showcasing a distinct “gap” commentary on what precisely counts for mathematical understanding and the next instructional steps commentary on the misconception or incomplete understanding so you learn why the student veered off course three additional tasks aligned to the mathematics topic and ideas about what students might do with these additional tasks. It’s time to break our habit of rushing into re-teaching for correctness and instead get curious about the space between right and wrong answers. Mine the Gap for Mathematical Understanding is a book you will return to again and again to get better at selecting tasks that will uncover students’ reasoning—better at discerning the quality and clarity of students’ understanding—and better at planning teaching based on the gaps you see.

When it comes to math, standards-aligned is achievement-aligned… Since The Common Core Mathematics Companions for grades K–2, 3–5 and 6–8 burst on the scene, they have been lauded as the best resources for making critical math ideas easy to teach. With this brand-new volume, high school mathematics success is at your fingertips. The authors lay out the pieces of an in-depth explanation, showing the mathematical progression of each conceptual category, how standards connect within and across domains, and what teachers and students should be doing every day to foster deep learning.

All students face struggle, and they should—it is how they learn and grow. The teacher’s job is not to remove struggle, but rather to value and harness it, helping students develop good habits of productive struggle. But what’s missing for many educators is an action plan for how to achieve this, especially when it comes to math. This book guides teachers through six specific actions—including valuing, fostering, building, planning, supporting, and reflecting on struggle—to create a game plan for overcoming obstacles by sharing · Actionable steps, activities, and tools for implementation · Instructional tasks representative of each grade level · Real-world examples showcasing classroom photos and student work

Detailed plans for helping elementary students experience deep mathematical learning Do you work tirelessly to make your math lessons meaningful, challenging, accessible, and engaging? Do you spend hours you don’t have searching for, adapting, and creating tasks to provide rich experiences for your students that supplement your mathematics curriculum? Help has arrived! Classroom Ready-Rich Math Tasks for Grades 4-5 details more than 50 research- and standards-aligned, high-cognitive-demand tasks that will have your students doing deep-problem-based learning. These ready-to-implement, engaging tasks connect skills, concepts and practices, while encouraging students to reason, problem-solve, discuss, explore multiple solution pathways, connect multiple representations, and justify their thinking. They help students monitor their own thinking and connect the mathematics they know to new situations. In other words, these tasks allow students to truly do mathematics! Written with a strengths-based lens and an attentiveness to all students, this guide includes: • Complete task-based lessons, referencing mathematics standards and practices, vocabulary, and materials • Downloadable planning tools, student resource pages, and thoughtful questions, and formative assessment prompts • Guidance on preparing, launching, facilitating, and reflecting on each task • Notes on access and equity, focusing on students’ strengths, productive struggle, and distance or alternative learning environments. With concluding guidance on adapting or creating additional rich tasks for your students, this guide will help you give all of your students the deepest, most enriching and engaging mathematics learning experience possible.