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The Math Learning Center Blog

Page 8 of 9

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
Just as your students have different learning styles, intelligence strengths, preferred tools, and ways to express themselves, they also have preferences about social interaction. All of these preferences can powerfully affect learning. Many students enjoy games and collaborative investigations. Some relish whole-group debates and thrive on the lively exchange that emerges in classroom discussions...
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
Getting to know your students well The first step in building a strong classroom community is getting to know your students as individuals. When children feel known, understood, and cared about, they are better able to develop relationships with you and with their peers. Strong relationships and a sense of belonging reduce the potential for challenging behavior and contribute to a positive...
Hannah Chandler
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...
The Number Rack facilitates the natural development of children’s number sense. Rows of moveable, colored beads encourage learners to think in groups of fives and tens, helping them to explore and discover a variety of addition and subtraction strategies. The Number Rack is featured extensively throughout Bridges in Mathematics in grades K–3. We’ve compiled a collection of resources to support the...
Jami Smith
Number Pieces helps students develop a deeper understanding of place value while building their computational skills with multi-digit numbers. Young learners can represent multi-digit numbers, regroup, add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Number Pieces also gives them a drawing tool to label representations and show their understanding. Number Pieces is the third app in the growing MLC collection...
Rick Ludeman, Chief Executive Officer