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The Math Learning Center Blog

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Editor's note: In this series of blog posts, we highlight educators in the field who are using remote learning resources intentionally to build classroom community, collaboration, and student sense-making. Educators share with us that one of the aspects of the Bridges classroom they miss the most this year is their turn-and-talk routine. Teachers wish they could hear the voices of their students...
In a remote environment, how can Bridges educators provide appropriate scaffolds and be responsive to student thinking? Sharing MLC apps with students can be a powerful approach, particularly when working with students in an asynchronous setting. What does it mean to share with an MLC app? Put simply, Bridges educators can build a “saved state” task that they share with their students by way of an...
Physical manipulatives are locked away in classrooms, so teachers, students, and families are turning to The Math Learning Center apps to support understanding of visual mathematics in a remote learning environment. Usage of these free virtual manipulatives and models has tripled over the last six weeks. On Friday, May 1, more than 500 educators attended an MLC webinar on how the apps can be used...
Bridges has a new feature! The Weekly Wonder can be found on the Bridges Educator Site. The initial Weekly Wonder demonstrates how technology — the Number Rack app — can unlock the mathematical power of three little beads. Bridges sessions are often structured so that the teacher acts as the facilitator and the students essentially teach themselves and others; this is how I presented the Weekly...
The Number Line app is the latest Math Learning Center app to be updated with the ability to share work between students and teachers. The process is the same as for Number Pieces and Number Rack: Set up your number line to pose a problem, show a strategy, or start a discussion. Select Share in the toolbar. Share the link or 8-digit code with others. Students can open the shared workspace with the...
SEG Measurement, an independent third-party research firm, recently conducted a study of the effectiveness of Bridges in Mathematics using data from the 2015–16 and 2016–17 school years. Approximately 1,000 students from over 40 classrooms participated in the study. Students who used Bridges were statistically matched with students using another elementary mathematics curriculum in a different...
Collin Nelson
We’ve all been through it before. We spend months teaching our students mathematical content and over time, we start to see them making progress. And then all of a sudden winter break sneaks up, seemingly out of nowhere. And when our students return two weeks later, we find it’s stressful to review concepts that we thought were secure, especially knowing that there’s new content to cover. This is...
Our curriculum specialists recently attended a workshop with Jo Boaler, Cathy Williams, and their youcubed team. We left energized by three key messages and affirmed by recognizing how The Math Learning Center addresses them. Math is visual The Math Learning Center grew out of a project funded by the National Science Foundation to improve the teaching of mathematics. Our founders developed a...
Pia Hansen
The 3Rs—Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic—have been foundational in education for thousands of years. My recent book, The Fourth R , adds to that list Reasoning/computational thinking. It concerns using human brains and computer brains, individually and working together, to solve problems and accomplish thoughts. Like each of the traditional 3Rs, computational thinking is both a discipline of study...
David Moursund
We’ve all had those conversations in which someone laments that math isn’t taught the same way it was “in the good ole days.” Our understanding of best practices in mathematics has changed, and change can be difficult for everyone. And it can be especially difficult to a parent who just worked a long day and is now trying to help their student with homework, using strategies they never learned in...