February 2023 Practical Practices

2022 Year in Review- CCTM Board Picks

Books:

Dear Citizen Math - This book pushes thinking on what we have our students engage with in order to learn mathematics, especially in today's society where understanding the role of mathematics in interpreting our world is so pivotal. Not only that, but the book provides many practical examples that can be easily applied to most any classroom. (Joseph Bolz - Treasurer)

High School Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice - This two-part book invites us, the educators, to reflect on our practices, the tasks we choose, and how we convey the importance of learning and utilizing mathematics in its first part. There are healthy tips for engaging all stakeholders in our classroom and showcasing that education is an activity in community engagement. In the second part, the lessons for each strand of mathematics incorporate some critical resources in supporting students to analyze the world around them with mathematics. These easy-to-adapt lessons can be used to span a learning goal, not just one day. (Megan Korponic - NCTM Representative)

Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - This engaging book is about the science of learning. It provides insights into how we as teachers can change small things in our classroom that have large impacts on student retention. (Andrew Busch - Region 2 Representative)

Necessary Conditions - This book outlines how to establish an engaging math classroom through academic safety and facilitating quality tasks. Although it is written for practicing teachers, it is a great read for preservice students to help them think about who they are teaching, what they teach, how they teach, and why they teach. (AnnMarie Cunningham - Region 5 Representative)

Number Talks: Whole Number Computations - This book is a great resource for getting started or refining your practice with number talks in K-5th grades.  One of the great things about this resource is that there are many example number talks for each grade level with progressions that help provide access points to students at all levels.  There is information and practice for learning to build the number talk practice by grade band, K-2 and 3-5.  (Peter Zola - Region 3 Representative)

Podcasts

NCSM Podcast Episode #68 – Rachel Lambert, “#DeleteDeficitThinking: How changing beliefs can transform our mathematics classrooms” – This podcast addresses the goal of improving the experiences of students with disabilities in the math class.  Rachel shares how we need to disrupt systems if we are really going to embrace inclusion and how we can help shape students’ perception of what it means to be good or bad at mathematics. (Lisa Rogers - Secretary)

Room to Grow Podcast -This math podcast brings you discussions on trending topics in math education in short segments. With their motto “We’re not here to talk at people. We’re here to think and learn with others — because when it comes to mathematics there’s always room to grow!”, each episode has many ideas for educators. One of the recent episode is with the president of the NCTM, Kevin Dykema:  Intervention for Middle School and High School with Kevin Dykema  (Kim Smith -Vice president)

Websites

Esti-Mysteries - If you are looking for a quick activity to increase number sense in your classroom, Steve Wyborney’s Esti-Mysteries provide a ready-to-use, engaging way to build familiarity with numbers at all levels K-12. Students use their estimation skills to guess at the number of items in a container.  They are then given a series of clues to narrow down the possibilities until the final (usually surprising) answer is revealed.  You will hear students debating, clarifying, and discovering as they participate.  An extension in your classroom would be to have your students build their own Esti-Mysteries! (Elissa Pitts - Region 4 Representative)

Math Milestones  The inspiration behind this website is to narrow a grade level’s standards down to one page of tasks.  Each task includes student handouts, grade-level grids, and teacher notes.  Teacher notes provide central math concepts, relevant prior knowledge, ways to scaffold student thinking through related and extended tasks.  Questions to help anticipate and respond to students’ thinking are also included.  (Mary Pittman - President)

Mathisfigureoutable.com- The workshops and podcasts available on this site have been such an enlightening way to grow my own mathematical thinking and learn about mathematizing as well as learn teacher moves for the classroom. Pam Harris has a free workshop in which she explains her thinking about the progression of mathematical thinking: Counting-->Additive Thinking--->Multiplicative Thinking--->Proportional Thinking, and how to move the math forward for all students. (Tiffany Trevenen - Region 6 Representative)

Thinking Mathematics! This website has many links to mathematics problems for different grade levels with curriculum inspirations. The example problems for different problem-solving strategies help us to see what each approach means and used in different contexts. (Gulden Karakok-MAA-Rocky Mountain Section Representative)

NCTM just released their version of the Best of 2022! Click here to see the resources and learnings they are highlighting!  https://www.nctm.org/Membership/Features/NCTM-Best-of-2022/ 

 

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