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Teaching Math for Understanding and Skills

This document outlines the vision for how math should be taught at a school. It states that the core mission is for every student to become confident and productive math users who can think quantitatively and solve problems, including those who learn differently embracing multiple solutions. This vision can only be achieved through a balanced math program emphasizing skills, concepts, applications, and instruction that stimulates curiosity and deep understanding. The program must be grounded in interactions where teachers expect students to persevere, think abstractly, construct arguments, critique reasoning, and model math, and teachers respond with questions, craft powerful tasks, elicit different approaches, use representations, develop number sense, create language-rich classrooms, and embed math in real contexts.

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12 views1 page

Teaching Math for Understanding and Skills

This document outlines the vision for how math should be taught at a school. It states that the core mission is for every student to become confident and productive math users who can think quantitatively and solve problems, including those who learn differently embracing multiple solutions. This vision can only be achieved through a balanced math program emphasizing skills, concepts, applications, and instruction that stimulates curiosity and deep understanding. The program must be grounded in interactions where teachers expect students to persevere, think abstractly, construct arguments, critique reasoning, and model math, and teachers respond with questions, craft powerful tasks, elicit different approaches, use representations, develop number sense, create language-rich classrooms, and embed math in real contexts.

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© All Rights Reserved
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Why We Teach Math the Way We Do

Developed in consultation with Steve Leinwand, American Institutes for Research

Vision Statement
It is a core mission of this school that every student be prepared to be a
confident user of mathematics, a powerful quantitative thinker, and a
productive problem solver. Further, it is paramount for students who learn
differently to explore and embrace the notion that multiple approaches can
lead to a correct solution. This mission can only be achieved within a
mathematics program that balances mathematical skills, concepts, and
applications with instruction that emphasizes explanation, justification, and
number sense. That is, our school is committed to a mathematics program built on teaching and learning
that actively engages students in experiences that stimulate curiosity, inquiry, joy and deep understanding
of the mathematics outlined in the Common Core.

While an effective mathematics program must be guided by a clear set of content standards, it must be
grounded by a shared vision of teaching and learning that is evident in the ongoing interactions among
students, teachers and the mathematics found in every mathematics lesson.

The adults must consistently expect and support our students to:
Persevere with solving interesting problems,
Reason abstractly and quantitatively,
Construct viable arguments,
Critique the reasoning of others, and
Model with mathematics.
Thus, teachers must consistently and expertly:
Respond to most student answers with why?, how do you know that?, can you explain your
thinking?, or Convince me;
Craft instruction around powerful tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving and promote
productive struggle;
Elicit, and celebrate alternative approaches to solving mathematics problems conveying to
students that we value understanding and not just memorizing the right procedure to get the one
right answer;
Use and connect multiple representations for example, models, diagrams, number lines, tables
and graphs, as well as symbols of all mathematical work to support the visualization of skills
and concepts;
Take every opportunity to develop number sense by asking for, and justifying, estimates, mental
calculations and equivalent forms of numbers;
Create language-rich classrooms that emphasize vocabulary, explanations and solutions in the
context of meaningful discourse among students;
Embed the mathematical content students are learning in real world contexts.

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