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The Math Learning Center Blog

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Computational fluency means more than quickly producing correct answers. It requires conceptual understanding and is exhibited through efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility. As you guide your students to mathematical fluency, you will give them many opportunities to construct relationships among numbers to make sense of basic facts and be able to retrieve them. Students who attain fluency with...
Hannah Chandler
Working in pairs and small groups Giving students opportunities to collaborate helps build a strong sense of community in your classroom, and research shows that students learn better when they learn together. Working together gives students the chance to grapple with problems, consider different points of view, and challenge and support each other, all of which contribute to stronger...
Hannah Chandler
The Common Core State Standards identify eight mathematical practices that characterize the ways in which mathematically proficient students engage with mathematics. The content standards describe what students are doing in mathematics, and the practices describe how they are doing it. For many teachers, these practices represent a dramatic shift in how their students are expected to learn and...
Martha Ruttle
Asking students questions and inviting them to ask questions of their own can help you discover and address their individual strengths and needs. You can tier questions and problems according to level of challenge, generally progressing from well-rooted, shared understandings toward higher-level work. This allows all students to contribute to the discussion as learning is constructed. Follow-up...
Carrie Baker
Increased Rigor With the tighter focus of the CCSSM comes greater depth and increased rigor. You’ll need to offer students many opportunities to develop conceptual understanding, practice key skills, and apply their skills and understandings to novel situations and problems. To support students in this rigorous approach to mathematics, you’ll need to be comfortable with the mathematics too. We...
Martha Ruttle
Creating an environment that supports risk taking In a collaborative classroom, students share their work, think aloud, ask questions, and work together. For this sharing and collaboration to be effective, they must feel comfortable taking risks and making mistakes. You can help students understand that mistakes are a very valuable part of the learning process and that working through mistakes and...
Hannah Chandler
Greater Coherence The CCSSM emphasize coherence within and across grade levels. This means that students’ experiences with a mathematical topic should be clearly tied to what they have already learned in earlier grade levels and what they will learn in the future. It also means that instruction should be carefully sequenced and that teachers should help students make connections between topics. We...
Martha Ruttle
The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics prompt teachers to significantly change both what they teach and how they teach it. In a series of posts, we’ll address the three characteristics of the new content standards likely to have the biggest impact on the way you teach math—tighter focus, greater coherence, and increased rigor. Finally, we’ll cover the other area of significant change, and...
"We must convey, from the very first day, the important message that we will tackle challenging material and do high-quality work in our classroom. But we must also convey that we will tackle this material and do this high-quality work in an atmosphere of support and collaboration." – Denton & Kriete, 2000 The key characteristics of a strong classroom community are: Respect among students and...
"Assessment should be more than merely a test at the end of instruction to see how students perform under special conditions; rather it should be an integral part of instruction that informs and guides teachers as they make instructional decisions." – NCTM Although the role of assessment has become a complex and sometimes charged topic, the daily reality of assessment in the classroom remains both...